23.04.

2017 Alfred,LordTennysonBritannicaOnlineEncyclopedia

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in
full Alfred Tennyson, 1st TABLEOFCONTENTS
Baron Tennyson of
Introduction
Aldworth and Freshwater
(born August 6, 1809, Earlylifeandwork
Somersby, Lincolnshire, Majorliterarywork
Englanddied October 6, Assessment
1892, Aldworth, Surrey),
English poet often
regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age
in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884.

Alfred,LordTennyson,lithographpublished EARLY LIFE AND WORK

inTheModernPortrait

Photos.com/Jupiterimages Tennyson was the fourth of 12 children, born into an old

Lincolnshire family, his father a rector. Alfred, with two of
his brothers, Frederick and Charles, was sent in 1815 to
Louth grammar schoolwhere he was unhappy. He left in
1820, but, though home conditions were difcult, his
father managed to give him a wide literary education.
Alfred was precocious, and before his teens he had
composed in the styles of Alexander Pope, Sir Walter
Scott, and John Milton. To his youth also belongs The Devil
and the Lady (a collection of previously unpublished
poems published posthumously in 1930), which shows an
astonishing understanding of Elizabethan dramatic verse.
Lord Byron was a dominant inuence on the young
Tennyson.
Alfred,LordTennyson,detailofanoil
At the lonely rectory in Somersby the children were
paintingbySamuelLaurence,c.1840in
theNational
thrown upon their own resources. All writers on Tennyson
emphasize the inuence of the Lincolnshire countryside
CourtesyoftheNationalPortraitGallery,
London
on his poetry: the plain, the sea about his home, the
sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea, and
the waste enormous marsh.

In 1824 the health of Tennysons father began to break down, and he took refuge in drink.
Alfred, though depressed by unhappiness at home, continued to write, collaborating with
https://www.britannica.com/print/article/587422 1/7
23.04.2017 Alfred,LordTennysonBritannicaOnlineEncyclopedia

Frederick and Charles in Poems by Two Brothers (1826; dated 1827). His contributions (more
than half the volume) are mostly in fashionable styles of the day.

In 1827 Alfred and Charles joined Frederick at Trinity College, Cambridge. There Alfred made
friends with Arthur Hallam, the gifted son of the historian Henry Hallam. This was the deepest
friendship of Tennysons life. The friends became members of the Apostles, an exclusive
undergraduate club of earnest intellectual interests. Tennysons reputation as a poet increased
at Cambridge. In 1829 he won the chancellors gold medal with a poem called Timbuctoo. In
1830 Poems, Chiey Lyrical was published; and in the same year Tennyson, Hallam, and other
Apostles went to Spain to help in the unsuccessful revolution against Ferdinand VII. In the
meantime, Hallam had become attached to Tennysons sister Emily but was forbidden by her
father to correspond with her for a year.

In 1831 Tennysons father died. Alfreds misery was increased by his grandfathers discovery of
his fathers debts. He left Cambridge without taking a degree, and his grandfather made
nancial arrangements for the family. In the same year, Hallam published a eulogistic article
on Poems, Chiey Lyrical in The Englishmans Magazine. He went to Somersby in 1832 as the
accepted suitor of Emily.

In 1832 Tennyson published another volume of his poems

(dated 1833), including The Lotos-Eaters, The Palace of
Art, and The Lady of Shalott. Among them was a
satirical epigram on the critic Christopher North
(pseudonym of the Scottish writer John Wilson), who had
attacked Poems, Chiey Lyrical in Blackwoods Magazine.
Tennysons sally prompted a scathing attack on his new
volume in the Quarterly Review. The attacks distressed
Tennyson, but he continued to revise his old poems and
compose new ones.

In 1833 Hallams engagement was recognized by his

family, but while on a visit to Vienna in September he
died suddenly. The shock to Tennyson was severe. It came
at a depressing time; three of his brothers, Edward,
Charles, and Septimus, were suffering from mental illness,
IAmHalfSickofShadowsSaidtheLady
ofShalott,showing
and the bad reception of his own work added to the
gloom. Yet it was in this period that he wrote some of his
Photos.com/Jupiterimages
most characteristic work: The Two Voices (of which the
original title, signicantly, was Thoughts of a Suicide),
Ulysses, St. Simeon Stylites, and, probably, the rst draft of Morte dArthur. To this period

https://www.britannica.com/print/article/587422 2/7
23.04.2017 Alfred,LordTennysonBritannicaOnlineEncyclopedia

also belong some of the poems that became constituent parts of In Memoriam, celebrating
Hallams death, and lyrics later worked into Maud.

In May 1836 his brother Charles married Louisa Sellwood of Horncastle, and at the wedding
Alfred fell in love with her sister Emily. For some years the lovers corresponded, but Emilys
father disapproved of Tennyson because of his bohemianism, addiction to port and tobacco,
and liberal religious views; and in 1840 he forbade the correspondence. Meanwhile the
Tennysons had left Somersby and were living a rather wandering life nearer London. It was in
this period that Tennyson made friends with many famous men, including the politician
William Ewart Gladstone, the historian Thomas Carlyle, and the poet Walter Savage Landor.

MAJOR LITERARY WORK

In 1842 Tennyson published Poems, in two volumes, one

containing a revised selection from the volumes of 1830
and 1832, the other, new poems. The new poems included
Morte dArthur, The Two Voices, Locksley Hall, and
The Vision of Sin and other poems that reveal a strange
navet, such as The May Queen, Lady Clara Vere de
Vere, and The Lord of Burleigh. The new volume was not
on the whole well received. But the grant to him at this
time, by the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, of a pension
of 200 helped to alleviate his nancial worries. In 1847 he
published his rst long poem, The Princess, a singular
anti-feminist fantasia.

The year 1850 marked a turning point. Tennyson resumed

Alfred,LordTennyson. his correspondence with Emily Sellwood, and their
EncyclopdiaBritannica,Inc. engagement was renewed and followed by marriage.
Meanwhile, Edward Moxon offered to publish the elegies
on Hallam that Tennyson had been composing over the years. They appeared, at rst
anonymously, as In Memoriam (1850), which had a great success with both reviewers and the
public, won him the friendship of Queen Victoria, and helped bring about, in the same year, his
appointment as poet laureate.

In Memoriam is a vast poem of 131 sections of varying length, with a prologue and epilogue.
Inspired by the grief Tennyson felt at the untimely death of his friend Hallam, the poem
touches on many intellectual issues of the Victorian Age as the author searches for the
meaning of life and death and tries to come to terms with his sense of loss. Most notably, In
Memoriam reects the struggle to reconcile traditional religious faith and belief in immortality
with the emerging theories of evolution and modern geology. The verses show the

https://www.britannica.com/print/article/587422 3/7
23.04.2017 Alfred,LordTennysonBritannicaOnlineEncyclopedia

development over three years of the poets acceptance and understanding of his friends death
and conclude with an epilogue, a happy marriage song on the occasion of the wedding of
Tennysons sister Cecilia.

After his marriage, which was happy, Tennysons life became more secure and outwardly
uneventful. There were two sons: Hallam and Lionel. The times of wandering and unsettlement
ended in 1853, when the Tennysons took a house, Farringford, in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson
was to spend most of the rest of his life there and at Aldworth (near Haslemere, Surrey).

Tennysons position as the national poet was conrmed by his Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington (1852)though some critics at rst thought it disappointingand the famous poem
on the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, published in 1855 in Maud and Other Poems.
Maud itself, a strange and turbulent monodrama, provoked a storm of protest; many of the
poets admirers were shocked by the morbidity, hysteria, and bellicosity of the hero. Yet Maud
was Tennysons favourite among his poems.

A project that Tennyson had long considered at last issued in Idylls of the King (1859), a series
of 12 connected poems broadly surveying the legend of King Arthur from his falling in love
with Guinevere to the ultimate ruin of his kingdom. The poems concentrate on the
introduction of evil to Camelot because of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Queen
Guinevere, and on the consequent fading of the hope that had at rst infused the Round Table
fellowship. Idylls of the King had an immediate success, and Tennyson, who loathed publicity,
had now acquired a sometimes embarrassing public fame. The Enoch Arden volume of 1864
perhaps represents the peak of his popularity. New Arthurian Idylls were published in The Holy
Grail, and Other Poems in 1869 (dated 1870). These were again well received, though some
readers were beginning to show discomfort at the Victorian moral atmosphere that Tennyson
had introduced into his source material from Sir Thomas Malory.

In 1874 Tennyson decided to try his hand at poetic drama. Queen Mary appeared in 1875, and
an abridged version was produced at the Lyceum in 1876 with only moderate success. It was
followed by Harold (1876; dated 1877), Becket (not published in full until 1884), and the village
tragedy The Promise of May, which proved a failure at the Globe in November 1882. This play
his only prose workshows Tennysons growing despondency and resentment at the religious,
moral, and political tendencies of the age. He had already caused some sensation by
publishing a poem called Despair in The Nineteenth Century (November 1881). A more
positive indication of Tennysons later beliefs appears in The Ancient Sage, published in
Tiresias and Other Poems (1885). Here the poet records his intimations of a life before and
beyond this life.

Tennyson accepted a peerage (after some hesitation) in 1884. In 1886 he published a new
volume containing Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, consisting mainly of imprecations against

https://www.britannica.com/print/article/587422 4/7
23.04.2017 Alfred,LordTennysonBritannicaOnlineEncyclopedia

modern decadence and liberalism and a retraction of the earlier poems belief in inevitable
human progress.

In 1889 Tennyson wrote the famous short poem Crossing the Bar, during the crossing to the
Isle of Wight. In the same year he published Demeter and Other Poems, which contains the
charming retrospective To Mary Boyle, The Progress of Spring, a ne lyric written much
earlier and rediscovered, and Merlin and the Gleam, an allegorical summing-up of his poetic
career. In 1892 his play The Foresters was successfully produced in New York City. Despite ill
health, he was able to correct the proofs of his last volume, The Death of Oenone, Akbars
Dream, and Other Poems (1892).

ASSESSMENT

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was the leading poet of the

Victorian Age in England and by the mid-19th century
had come to occupy a position similar to that of
Alexander Pope in the 18th. Tennyson was a consummate
poetic artist, consolidating and rening the traditions
bequeathed to him by his predecessors in the Romantic
movementespecially Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. His
poetry is remarkable for its metrical variety, rich
descriptive imagery, and exquisite verbal melodies. But
Tennyson was also regarded as the preeminent
spokesman for the educated middle-class Englishman, in
moral and religious outlook and in political and social
consciousness no less than in matters of taste and
Alfred,LordTennyson,lithographaftera
sentiment. His poetry dealt often with the doubts and
portraitbyGeorgeFrederickWatts.
difculties of an age in which established Christian faith
Photos.com/Jupiterimages
and traditional assumptions about mans nature and
destiny were increasingly called into question by science
and modern progress. His poetry dealt with these misgivings, moreover, as the intimate
personal problems of a sensitive and troubled individual inclined to melancholy. Yet through
his poetic masterythe spaciousness and nobility of his best verse, its classical aptness of
phrase, its distinctive harmonyhe conveyed to sympathetic readers a feeling of implicit
reassurance, even serenity. Tennyson may be seen as the rst great English poet to be fully
aware of the new picture of mans place in the universe revealed by modern science. While the
contemplation of this unprecedented human situation sometimes evoked his fears and
forebodings, it also gave him a larger imaginative range than most of the poets of his time and
added a greater depth and resonance to his art.

https://www.britannica.com/print/article/587422 5/7
23.04.2017 Alfred,LordTennysonBritannicaOnlineEncyclopedia

Tennysons ascendancy among Victorian poets began to be questioned even during his
lifetime, however, when Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne were serious rivals.
And 20th-century criticism, inuenced by the rise of a new school of poetry headed by T.S.
Eliot (though Eliot himself was an admirer of Tennyson), proposed some drastic devaluations of
his work. Undoubtedly, much in Tennyson that appealed to his contemporaries has ceased to
appeal to many readers today. He can be mawkish and banal, pompous and orotund, offering
little more than the melliuous versifying of shallow or confused thoughts. The rediscovery of
such earlier poets as John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins (a poet of Tennysons own time
who was then unknown to the public), together with the widespread acceptance of Eliot and
W.B. Yeats as the leading modern poets, opened the ears of readers to a very different, and
perhaps more varied, poetic music. A more balanced estimate of Tennyson has begun to
prevail, however, with the recognition of the enduring greatness of Ulysses, the unique
poignancy of Tennysons best lyric poems, and, above all, the stature of In Memoriam as the
great representative poem of the Victorian Age. It is now also recognized that the realistic and
comic aspects of Tennysons work are more important than they were thought to be during
the period of the reaction against him. Finally, the perception of the poets awed sense of the
mystery of life, which lies at the heart of his greatness, as in Crossing the Bar or Flower in the
Crannied Wall, unites his admirers in this century with those in the last. Though less of
Tennysons work may survive than appeared likely during his Victorian heyday, what does
remainand it is by no means small in quantityseems likely to be imperishable.

William Wallace Robson

The Editors of Encyclopdia Britannica

"Alfred, Lord Tennyson".Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Online.

Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2017. Web. 23 Apr. 2017
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-Lord-Tennyson>.

https://www.britannica.com/print/article/587422 6/7
23.04.2017 Alfred,LordTennysonBritannicaOnlineEncyclopedia

https://www.britannica.com/print/article/587422 7/7