Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria’s reign. Born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, he came from a successful middle-class family of minor landowning status. His father, George Clayton Tennyson, was an Anglican clergyman and a man of wide interests, with abilities in architecture, painting, music, and poetry. He carefully attended to the education and training of his children, and Alfred grew up in a household where reading and verse were part of daily life.

Tennyson began writing young. He and two of his elder brothers were composing poetry in their teens, and a local collection of their work appeared when Alfred was 17. He studied at King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth, from 1816 to 1820, then entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827. There he joined the Cambridge Apostles and met Arthur Hallam and William Henry Brookfield, who became his closest friends. Tennyson later recalled that, as a boy, he was “an enormous admirer of Byron,” a sign of the strong poetic influence that helped shape his early imagination.

His first publication was Poems by Two Brothers in 1827, a collection of “his boyish rhymes and those of his elder brother Charles.” In 1829, he won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge for “Timbuktu,” one of his first pieces. His first solo collection, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, followed in 1830 and included “Claribel” and “Mariana,” later counted among his most celebrated poems. Some critics found him overly sentimental, but his verse became popular and brought him to the attention of major writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Loss and criticism marked his early career. After his father died in 1831, Tennyson left Cambridge before taking his degree and returned to the family rectory, where he shared responsibility for his widowed mother and the family. In 1833 he published a second book of poetry, including the first version of “The Lady of Shalott.” Heavy criticism discouraged him so much that he did not publish again for ten years, though he continued to write. That same year, Arthur Hallam died suddenly after a cerebral haemorrhage while on holiday in Vienna. Hallam’s death deeply affected Tennyson and inspired several poems, including “In Memoriam A.H.H.”

Tennyson became especially known for short lyrics such as “Break, Break, Break,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Tears, Idle Tears,” and “Crossing the Bar.” Much of his verse drew on classical mythological themes, including “Ulysses” and “The Lotos-Eaters.” He also wrote notable blank verse, among it Idylls of the King, “Ulysses,” and “Tithonus.” His early poetry, with its medievalism and strong visual imagery, influenced the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He attempted drama as well, though his plays had little success.

Many phrases from Tennyson’s work have passed into common English speech: “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all,” “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die,” and “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. His words remain alive because they give clear form to grief, courage, doubt, longing, and the search for meaning, feelings that readers still recognize at once.