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’sOrigin
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.
