Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809–1892
Biography
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born in rural Lincolnshire in 1809 and died in 1892, having been for much of the nineteenth century the most widely read poet in England. He held the post of Poet Laureate for most of Queen Victoria's long reign, and late in life he was raised to the peerage as Baron Tennyson. At Cambridge he won the Chancellor's Gold Medal in 1829 for the poem “Timbuktu”, and his first volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, followed in 1830. His early work, with its medieval settings and strong visual images, shaped the taste of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
He wrote in several forms, but his most lasting work is in shorter lyrics and in blank verse. Poems such as “Break, Break, Break”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Crossing the Bar” are still widely read, and classical myth gave him material for “Ulysses” and “The Lotos-Eaters”. His Idylls of the King took the Arthurian legends and turned them into a long cycle in blank verse. In Memoriam A. H. H. is an elegy for his close friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow student at Cambridge who died suddenly at twenty-two. It is long, searching and full of doubt as well as grief. A few reviewers found his manner too tender for their taste, yet his poems found a large readership, and many of his lines have passed into everyday English. His attempts at drama won little success.
On this site you can read three of his books: In Memoriam A. H. H., the elegy for Arthur Hallam; Idylls of the King, his cycle of Arthur and his knights; and Maud, and Other Poems, a collection built around one long monologue by a troubled speaker. Together they show three sides of Victorian poetry: grief and faith, legend and public duty, and private feeling.
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Books
Idylls of the King
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Tennyson's twelve idylls follow King Arthur's Round Table from its founding, through the quests of Gareth, Geraint and Lancelot, to the slow corruption of the court by Guinevere's love and the treason of Modred. The cycle ends in Arthur's last battle and his passing across the…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.In Memoriam A. H. H.
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Tennyson's long elegy for his friend Arthur Hallam, who died suddenly in 1833, is a sequence of short lyrics written over seventeen years about grief, doubt and a slow, hard-won faith. Its lines 'Tis better to have loved and lost' and 'Nature, red in tooth and claw' are among…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Maud, and Other Poems
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In Maud, a morbid young man tells in lyrics of rising and falling mood how he loves the daughter of his father's enemy, kills her brother in a duel, and goes mad before he finds a purpose in the Crimean War. The 1859 volume adds The Brook, The Letters, The Daisy and shorter…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.The Princess: A Medley
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
A prince betrothed since childhood to Princess Ida finds she has founded a women's college where no man may enter, and he and two friends sneak in disguised as women. Tennyson's 'medley' in blank verse, with its songs between the parts, takes the question of women's education…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.