Context
The English poet Alfred Tennyson was born in Sommersby, England on August 6,
1809, twenty years after the start of the French
Revolution and toward the end of the Napoleonic
Wars. He was the fourth of twelve children born to
George and Elizabeth Tennyson. His father, a church reverend, supervised his
sons' private education, though his heavy drinking impeded his ability to
fulfill his duties. His mother was an avid supporter of the Evangelical
movement, which aimed to replace nominal Christianity with a genuine, personal
religion. The young Alfred demonstrated an early flair for poetry, composing a
full-length verse drama at the age of fourteen. In 1827, when he was eighteen,
he and his brother Charles published an anonymous collection entitled Poems
by Two Brothers, receiving a few vague complimentary reviews.
That same year, Tennyson left home to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, under
the supervision of William Whewell, the great nineteenth-century scientist,
philosopher, and theologian. University life exposed him to the most urgent
political issue in his day--the question of Parliamentary Reform, which
ultimately culminated in the English Reform Bill of 1832. Although Tennyson
believed that reform was long overdue, he felt that it must be undertaken
cautiously and gradually; his university poems show little interest in politics.
Tennyson soon became friendly with a group of undergraduates calling themselves
the "Apostles," which met to discuss literary issues. The group was led by
Arthur Henry Hallam, who soon became Tennyson's closest friend. Tennyson and
Hallam toured Europe together while still undergraduates, and Hallam later
became engaged to the poet's sister Emily. In 1830, Tennyson published
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, to Hallam's great praise. However, within the
larger critical world, this work, along with Tennyson's 1832 volume including
"The Lady of Shalott" and "The Lotos-Eaters," met with hostile disparagement;
the young poet read his reviews with dismay.
In 1833, no longer able to afford college tuition, Tennyson was living back at
home with his family when he received the most devastating blow of his entire
life: he learned that his dear friend Hallam had died suddenly of fever while
traveling abroad. His tremendous grief at the news permeated much of Tennyson's
later poetry, including the great elegy
"In Memoriam." This poem represents the
poet's struggles not only with the news of his best friend's death, but
also with the new developments in astronomy, biology, and geology that
were diminishing man's stature on the scale of evolutionary time;
although Darwin's Origin of Species did not
appear until
1859, notions of evolution were already in circulation, articulated in Charles
Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) and Robert
Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844).
Tennyson first began to achieve critical success with the publication of his
Poems in 1842, a work that include
"Ulysses,"
"Tithonus," and other famous short lyrics
about mythical and philosophical subjects. At the time of publication,
England had seen the death of Coleridge,
Shelley, Byron, Keats, and indeed all
of the great Romantic poets except Wordsworth;
Tennyson thus filled a lacuna in the English literary scene. In 1845,
he began receiving a small government pension for his poetry. In 1850,
Wordsworth, who had been Britain's Poet Laureate, died at the age of 80;
upon the publication of "In Memoriam," Tennyson was named to succeed him
in this honor. With this title he became the most popular poet in
Victorian England and could finally afford to marry Emily Sellwood,
whom he had loved since 1836. The marriage began sadly--the couple's first
son was stillborn in 1851--but the couple soon found happiness: in 1853
they were able to move to a secluded country house on the Isle of Wight,
where they raised two sons named Hallam and Lionel.
Tennyson continued to write and to gain popularity. His later poetry primarily
followed a narrative rather than lyrical style; as the novel began to emerge as
the most popular literary form, poets began searching for new ways of telling
stories in verse. For example, in Tennyson's poem "Maud," a speaker tells
his story in a sequence of short lyrics in varying meters; Tennyson
described the work as an experimental "monodrama." Not only were his
later verses concerned with dramatic fiction, they also examined current
national political drama. As Poet Laureate, Tennyson represented the
literary voice of the nation and, as such, he made occasional
pronouncements on political affairs. For example, "The Charge of the
Light Brigade" (1854) described a
disastrous battle in the Crimean War and praised the heroism of the
British soldiers there. In 1859, Tennyson published the first four
Idylls of the King, a
group of
twelve blank-verse narrative poems tracing the story of the legendary King
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. This collection, dedicated to Prince
Albert, enjoyed much popularity among the royal family, who saw Arthur's lengthy
reign as a representation of Queen Victoria's 64-year rule (1837-1901).
In 1884, the Royals granted Tennyson a baronetcy; he was now known as Alfred,
Lord Tennyson. He dedicated most of the last fifteen years of his life to
writing a series of full-length dramas in blank verse, which, however, failed to
excite any particular interest. In 1892, at the age of 83, he died of heart
failure and was buried among his illustrious literary predecessors at
Westminster Abbey. Although Tennyson was the most popular poet in England in
his own day, he was often the target of mockery by his immediate successors, the
Edwardians and Georgians of the early twentieth century. Today, however, many
critics consider Tennyson to be the greatest poet of the Victorian Age; and he
stands as one of the major innovators of lyric and metrical form in all of
English poetry.
