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(born Aug. 6, 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, Eng. —  died Oct. 6, 1892, Aldworth, Surrey)

English poet, the leading poet of the Victorian age. While attending Cambridge University,

Tennyson developed a deep friendship with Arthur Hallam. His reputation as a poet increased

at Cambridge, and he published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical  (1830). Another volume, including

"The Lotos-Eaters" and "The Lady of Shalott," was published in 1832 (dated 1833). Hallam's

sudden death in 1833 prompted Tennyson to write poems that eventually became part of the

vast In Memoriam (1850) and lyrics that later appeared in the brooding Maud  (1855), his

favourite poem. Poems (1842), including "Ulysses," "Morte d'Arthur," and "Locksley Hall,"

followed, then The Princess (1847), a long antifeminist fantasia that includes such lyrics as

"Sweet and Low" and "Tears, Idle Tears." In 1850 he married; that year he was also named

 poet laureate of England. Among his subsequent works are "The Charge of the Light

Brigade" (1855); Idylls of the King  (1859), treating the Arthurian legend; and Enoch Arden 

(1864). A consummate poet who was inclined to melancholy, Tennyson was also regarded as

a spokesman for the educated English middle class. His works often dealt with the difficulties

of an age when traditional assumptions were increasingly called into question by science and

modern progress. 

The English poet Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (1809-1892), was regarded by his

contemporaries as the greatest poet of Victorian England. A superb craftsman in verse, he

wrote poetry that ranged from confident assertion to black despair. 

Alfred Tennyson, who is known as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on Aug. 6, 1809, in the

rectory of the village of Somersby, Lincolnshire. His parents were the Reverend George

Clayton Tennyson and Elizabeth Fytche Tennyson; he was one of eight sons - there were four

daughters as well. Dr. Tennyson, the poet's father, was the elder of the two sons of a

 prosperous businessman who favored his younger son and thus left Dr. Tennyson embittered

and relatively impoverished. He was an educated man, a country clergyman, and Alfred read

widely in his father's library. As Dr. Tennyson grew older, he grew more passionate and

melancholy: he took to drink, he suffered from lapses of memory, and he once even tried to

kill his eldest son. Misfortune and madness, not surprisingly, haunted the whole Tennyson

family. The year he died, Dr. Tennyson said of his children, "They are all strangely brought

up."

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Early Poetry and Cambridge

Tennyson began writing poetry as a child. At 12 he was writing a 6, 000-line epic in imitation

of Sir Walter Scott. Other youthful models were Lord Byron, whose death in 1824 he

 particularly mourned, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. When he was 14, Tennyson wrote a play

called The Devil and the Lady, a dexterous imitation of Elizabethan comic verse.

In 1827 there appeared an unpretentious volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers; the book,

despite its title, included poems by three of the Tennyson brothers, a little less than half of

them probably by Alfred. That same year Alfred and Charles joined their brother Frederick at

Trinity College, Cambridge University. In 1829 Tennyson joined the Apostles, an

undergraduate discussion group, some of whose members would over the years continue to be his closest friends. Tennyson's undergraduate days were a time of intellectual and political

turmoil in England. The institutions of church and state were being challenged, and the

Apostles debated the issues which led to the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. Among the

Apostles, Tennyson's closest friend was Arthur Hallam, a wonderfully gifted young man

whose early tragic death in 1833 would inspire In Memoriam. 

In 1830 the Apostles took up the cause of a group of Spanish revolutionaries; Tennyson and

Hallam went to the Pyrenees on an unsuccessful mission to aid the rebels. Also in 1830

Tennyson published his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical; of these poems perhaps the best-known and

most characteristic is "Mariana, " where melancholy is suggested by the depiction of a

landscape much like that of Tennyson's native Lincolnshire. Those who knew Tennyson as a

university student were impressed by his commanding physical presence and by his youthful

literary achievements. In 1831 his father died, and Tennyson left the university without

taking a degree.

Discovery of a Vocation

In the volume entitled Poems, which Tennyson published in 1832, a recurring theme is the

conflict between a selfish love of beauty and the obligation to serve society. The collection

includes "The Lady of Shalott, " a narrative set in Arthurian England in which retired

estheticism is destroyed by a dangerous "real" world, and "The Palace of Art, " an allegory

which finally affirms the teaching obligations of the poet. Tennyson was depressed by some

of the reviews of this book, and he was cast down by Hallam's death; for the next 10 years he

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 published nothing. In 1836 he fell in love with Emily Sellwood, whom he met at the marriage

of her sister to his brother George. In 1840 he invested what money he had inherited in a

scheme for  woodworking machinery; by 1843 he had lost his small patrimony. 

 Poems, Two Volumes (1842) presaged a change in Tennyson's fortunes. Here for the first time

appeared one of the several poems which would eventually make up the Idylls of the King. 

Other poems in this collection are "Ulysses, " a dramatic monologue in which the aging king

urges his companions to undertake a final heroic journey, and "The Two Voices, " an interior

debate between the death wish and the will to live. Poems, Two Volumes was well received,

and Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, who was particularly impressed by "Ulysses, "

awarded Tennyson a pension which guaranteed him £200 a year.

The Princess: A Medley (1847) is Tennyson's attempt to meet the charge that he had

neglected the social responsibilities of the poet. This fable, in some 3, 000 lines of blank

verse, is concerned with the cause of woman's rights. The poem is a generally lighthearted

work - in 1870 William S. Gilbert produced a comic stage version - and Tennyson cautiously

advocates a greater appreciation of the feminine intelligence.

In Memoriam

The great year of Tennyson's life is 1850: on June 1 he published In Memoriam, the long

elegy inspired by the death of Hallam; less than 2 weeks later he married Emily Sellwood,

with whom he had fallen in love 14 years before; and in November he was appointed poet

laureate to succeed William Wordsworth. Tennyson's years of uncertainty and financial

insecurity were over; he became the greatly esteemed poetic spokesman of his age.

 In Memoriam is in form a series of 129 lyrics of varying length, all composed in the same

stanzaic form. The lyrics may be read individually, rather like the entries in a journal, but the

 poem has an overall organization. It begins with the death of Hallam, who was engaged to

Tennyson's sister, and it ends with the marriage of another sister. Tennyson described it as a

"kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness." The poem covers a period of roughly 3

years, punctuated by three celebrations of Christmas. The movement of the poem, though it is

as irregular as a fever chart, is from grief through resignation to joy. The poem combines

 private feeling with a perplexity over the future of Christianity which was shared by many of

Tennyson's contemporaries.

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With his family Tennyson settled in Farringford on the Isle of Wight in a seclusion frequently

interrupted by admiring tourists, many of them Americans. More welcome visitors were his

friends Edward Lear, the comic poet; Charles Kingsley, the novelist; Benjamin Jowett, the

master of Balliol College; and even Albert, the Prince Consort, who took away cowslips to

make tea for Queen Victoria.

Although Tennyson was now settled and prosperous, his next book, Maud and Other Poems 

(1855), is notable for another study in melancholy. He called the title poem a "monodrama, "

a form somewhere between a dramatic monologue and a verse play. We hear only one voice,

that of a hysterical young man who is sometimes close to madness. Tennyson described the

 poem as a "little Hamlet." It almost certainly expresses some of the author's youthful

anxieties as recollected in middle age. The hero furiously rejects the materialism and

callousness of 19th-century society. He is preoccupied by thoughts of his father's suicide, and

his reason is endangered when he accidentally kills the brother of Maud, the girl he loves.

The hero then exiles himself to France, and, when he learns of Maud's death, he enlists to

fight in the Crimea in the hope that the violence of war will somehow redeem him. The poem

is now much admired for its metrical virtuosity and for its dramatization of  neurotic states of

mind. Of the other poems in the 1855 volume, the best-known are "The Charge of the Light

Brigade" and "The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, " certainly the greatest of the

 poems written by Tennyson in his capacity as poet laureate.

The Idylls of the King  

Between 1856 and 1876 Tennyson's principal concern was the composition of a series of

linked narrative poems about King Arthur and the Round Table. He worked on this project

for more than 20 years: one section was written as early as 1833; another part was not

 published until 1884. As definitively collected in 1889, The Idylls of the King  consists of a

dedication to the Prince Consort, 12 blank-verse narratives (the idylls) which deal with

Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guenevere, and other figures in the court, and an epilogue

addressed to the Queen. The individual narratives are linked by a common theme: the

destructive effect of sexual passion on an honorable society. The Round Table is brought

down in ruins by the illicit love of Lancelot and Guenevere. Some of Tennyson's

contemporaries regretted that he had lavished so much attention on the legendary past; it is

clear, however, that this myth of a dying society expressed some of his fears for 19th-century

England.

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Plays and Last Years

Tennyson had a long and immensely productive literary career, and a chronology shows that

he did ambitious work until late in his life. In his 60s he wrote a series of historical verse

 plays - Queen Mary (1875), Harold  (1876), and Becket  (1879) - on the "making of England."

The plays were intended to revive a sense of national grandeur and to remind the English of

their liberation from Roman Catholicism.

Tennyson's last years were crowned with many honors. The widowed Queen Victoria ranked

 In Memoriam next to the Bible as a solace in her grief. In 1883 Tennyson was awarded a

 peerage. He died on Oct. 6, 1892, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey after a great

funeral. The choir sang a musical setting for "Crossing the Bar, " the poem, written a fewyears earlier, which is placed at the end of all collections of his work.

Further Reading

The best edition of Tennyson's work is Christopher B. Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson (1969).

Hallam Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir  (2 vols., 1897), is the official

 biography. Important new materials are in Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (1949).

The most recent biography, Joanna Richardson, The Pre-eminent Victorian: A Study of

Tennyson (1964), is readable but shallow. Particularly valuable critical studies are J. H.

Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet  (1960), and Valerie Pitt, Tennyson Laureate 

(1962). Important specialized studies include Edgar Finley Shannon, Tennyson and the

 Reviewers (1952); John Killham, Tennyson and the Princess: Reflections of an Age (1958);

and R. W. Rader, Tennyson's Maude: The Biographical Genesis (1963). The reactions of

Tennyson's first readers may be studied in John D. Jump, ed., Tennyson: The Critical

 Heritage (1967).