Biography of Poet Alfred Tennyson

Jul 23, 2006

Biography of Poet Alfred Tennyson

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Biography of Poet Alfred Tennyson

Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron 1809-92, English poet. The most famous poet of the Victorian age, he was a profound spokesman for the ideas and values of his times.

Tennyson was the son of an intelligent but unstable clergyman in Lincolnshire. His early literary attempts included a play, The Devil and the Lady, composed at 14, and poems written with his brothers Frederick and Charles but entitled Poems by Two Brothers (1827). In his three years at Cambridge, Tennyson wrote a prizewinning poem, Timbuctoo (1829), and Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and began his close friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam, son of the historian Henry Hallam.

Upon the death of his father in 1831, Tennyson became responsible for the family and its precarious finances. His volume Poems (1832) included some of his most famous pieces, such as The Lotus-Eaters, A Dream of Fair Women, and The Lady of Shalott. In 1833 he was overwhelmed by the sudden death of Hallam.

Tennyson's next published work, Poems (1842), expressed his philosophic doubts in a materialistic, increasingly scientific age and his longing for a sustaining faith. The new poems included Locksley Hall, Ulysses, Morte d'Arthur, and Break, Break, Break. With this book he was acclaimed a great poet, and in addition, he was granted an annual government pension of Ј200 in 1845.

The Princess (1847) was followed in 1850 by the masterful In Memoriam, an elegy sequence that records Tennyson's years of doubt and despair after Hallam's death and culminates in an affirmation of immortality. The same year saw his appointment as poet laureate and his marriage to Emily Sellwood, whom he had courted since 1836 but had been unable to marry because of his precarious financial position. Occasional poems, such as the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1855), were part of his duties as laureate.

The first group of Idylls of the King appeared in 1859; it was expanded in 1869 and 1872, and in 1885 Tennyson added the final poem. He arranged the 12 poems chronologically in