Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson was born on August 6, 1809, in the village of Somersby, Lincolnshire, the fourth of twelve children of the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson and his wife Elizabeth Fytche ^[1]. The rectory was crowded, bookish, and unhappy. George Tennyson had been disinherited in favor of a younger brother and pushed into the church against his inclination, a grievance that fed years of drinking, depression, and violent episodes that shadowed the household ^[2].

The children absorbed both the trouble and the learning. Several of Alfred's brothers suffered mental illness or addiction in later life, and the poet himself worried throughout his career about what he called the "black blood" of the Tennysons ^[2]. Yet the rectory library was large, and George, whatever his failings, drilled his sons in classical languages. Alfred was writing verse in the manner of Alexander Pope, James Thomson, and Walter Scott before he entered his teens, and by his own account composed thousands of lines as a boy ^[1].

After four unhappy years at Louth Grammar School, Alfred was educated at home. In 1827 he and his brother Charles published Poems by Two Brothers, a slim volume issued by a Louth bookseller that also contained work by their brother Frederick ^[3]. That same year Alfred followed his brothers to Trinity College, Cambridge, escaping Somersby for a wider world.

Cambridge changed Tennyson's life less through its formal teaching, which he largely ignored, than through the friendships it gave him. In 1829 he was invited to join the Apostles, an undergraduate debating society whose members included some of the most gifted young men of the generation ^[1]. Among them was Arthur Henry Hallam, a brilliant and charming student who became Tennyson's closest friend and, in time, the fiancé of his sister Emily ^[4].

Recognition came early. In 1829 Tennyson won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for his poem "Timbuctoo", and in 1830 he published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, which contained "Mariana", a study in desolate waiting that already showed his gift for mood and sound ^[3]. Hallam promoted the book energetically, reviewing it in glowing terms and treating his friend as the coming poet of the age.

The Cambridge years ended abruptly. George Tennyson died in 1831, and Alfred left without taking a degree to help manage his family's affairs ^[1]. Worse followed. His 1832 volume Poems, which included early versions of "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Lotos-Eaters", was savaged by the critic John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review, a mauling that wounded Tennyson deeply ^[2]. Then, in September 1833, Hallam died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna at the age of 22. The loss devastated Tennyson and became the central event of his inner life, the seed of the elegy he would work on for the next seventeen years ^[4].

The decade after Hallam's death is often called Tennyson's "ten years' silence", though he never stopped writing. Stung by the reviews, he published no new volume between 1832 and 1842, instead revising obsessively and drafting the short elegies that would grow into In Memoriam ^[1]. These were also years of poverty and drift. A disastrous investment in a wood-carving scheme run by a Dr. Matthew Allen wiped out much of the family's money around 1840, and Tennyson's health and spirits sank ^[2].

The turn came in 1842 with the two-volume Poems, which mixed revised earlier work with new pieces such as "Ulysses", "Morte d'Arthur", "Locksley Hall", and "Break, Break, Break" ^[3]. Reviewers who had mocked the young Tennyson now took him seriously; "Ulysses", written in the weeks after Hallam's death, distilled grief into a dramatic monologue of stubborn endurance that remains among the most quoted poems in English ^[4]. In 1845 the government granted him a Civil List pension of 200 pounds a year, easing his financial strain ^[1].

Everything converged in 1850, the great hinge of his career. In May he published, at first anonymously, In Memoriam A.H.H., the long elegy for Hallam composed of 131 linked lyrics written across seventeen years ^[4]. In June he married Emily Sellwood, whom he had loved since the 1830s but had been unable to wed through years of poverty and doubt. And in November, following the death of William Wordsworth, Queen Victoria appointed him Poet Laureate, reportedly influenced by Prince Albert's admiration for In Memoriam ^[5].

Any account of Alfred, Lord Tennyson achievements begins with In Memoriam. The poem faced squarely the religious doubt stirred by contemporary geology and pre-Darwinian science, asking whether a universe of extinct species, "Nature, red in tooth and claw", could be reconciled with a loving God, and arriving at a hard-won, questioning faith ^[4]. Queen Victoria told Tennyson that next to the Bible the poem was her greatest comfort after Prince Albert's death in 1861 ^[5]. Its lines gave the language one of its most familiar consolations: "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all."

As Laureate, Tennyson proved that an official poet could produce work of lasting power. "The Charge of the Light Brigade", written in 1854 within weeks of the disastrous cavalry action at Balaclava during the Crimean War, fixed the event in national memory with its pounding rhythm and the line "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die" ^[6]. His "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852) showed the same ability to make public occasion into genuine poetry.

Commercial success matched critical standing. Maud (1855), a strange "monodrama" of obsession and war fever, divided readers but sold well; Enoch Arden (1864) sold tens of thousands of copies within months ^[1]. His largest project was Idylls of the King, a cycle of twelve narrative poems retelling the Arthurian legends, published in installments between 1859 and 1885 and dedicated to the memory of Prince Albert ^[3]. The Idylls used Camelot's rise and fall as a mirror for Victorian ideals and their fragility, and they made Tennyson wealthy on a scale no previous English poet had known from verse alone.

Tennyson's marriage to Emily Sellwood in 1850 ended a courtship stretched across nearly fourteen years, interrupted by his poverty and by religious scruples on her family's side ^[1]. Emily became his manager as much as his wife, handling correspondence and shielding him from intrusions. The couple had two sons: Hallam, named for Arthur Hallam and born in 1852, and Lionel, born in 1854. A first son had been stillborn in 1851 ^[2].

In 1853 the family settled at Farringford, a house on the Isle of Wight near Freshwater, which Tennyson later bought outright with the profits from Maud ^[7]. There he worked, walked the downs in his wide-brimmed hat and cloak, and received a stream of famous visitors, from Prince Albert to Garibaldi. His neighbor, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, made a series of portraits of him, including one he wryly called "the dirty monk" ^[7]. As tourists began hunting the famous poet on the island, he built a second, more secluded home, Aldworth, near Haslemere on the Surrey and Sussex border, completed in 1869 ^[1].

The man behind the public figure was shy, superstitious about criticism, short-sighted, and fond of port and pipe tobacco. Friends recorded his booming Lincolnshire voice reading his own verse aloud; late in life he made wax cylinder recordings for Thomas Edison's representatives, so his reading of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" can still be heard today ^[6]. Grief revisited him in 1886 when his younger son Lionel died of fever on a voyage home from India, a loss he mourned in verse addressed to Lionel's father-in-law ^[2].

Honors accumulated in old age. Tennyson declined a baronetcy several times, but in 1883, on Prime Minister William Gladstone's recommendation, he accepted a peerage, becoming Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Freshwater in January 1884 ^[1]. He was the first person raised to the House of Lords specifically for achievement in poetry, and he took his seat in March 1884, occasionally voting though rarely speaking ^[5]. As a peer he counted, in the loosest sense, as a politician, though his politics were instinctive rather than partisan: broadly patriotic, wary of revolution, sympathetic to gradual reform.

His creative energy barely slackened. In his seventies and eighties he wrote plays, including Becket, which the actor Henry Irving staged successfully after the poet's death, and volumes such as Tiresias and Other Poems (1885) and Demeter and Other Poems (1889) ^[3]. "Crossing the Bar", a short lyric on death composed in 1889 while crossing the Solent, became his self-chosen envoi; he asked that it be printed at the end of every edition of his poems ^[1].

Tennyson died at Aldworth on October 6, 1892, aged 83, a volume of Shakespeare open beside him and moonlight, by his family's account, falling across the bed ^[2]. He was buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, next to Robert Browning, with crowds filling the Abbey for the funeral. He had held the laureateship for 42 years, longer than anyone before or since ^[5].

Who was Alfred, Lord Tennyson to later generations? For decades after 1892 his reputation swung hard. Modernist poets and critics of the early twentieth century mocked what they saw as Victorian complacency and over-sweet music, though T. S. Eliot, in an influential essay, called him a great poet on account of his ear, judging In Memoriam a work of profound doubt rather than easy faith ^[8]. Later scholarship, led by biographers such as Robert Bernard Martin, restored a more complicated figure: a technically masterful, psychologically dark writer whose smooth surfaces cover anxiety, loss, and obsession ^[2].

His penetration of everyday English is a plain Alfred, Lord Tennyson fact that few poets match. "Nature, red in tooth and claw", "theirs not to reason why", "the old order changeth", and "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" all circulate far beyond readers of poetry; the last of these is inscribed on a memorial cross at Observation Hill in Antarctica for the polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott ^[6]. "Ulysses" has been quoted in parliaments and films, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" remains the standard literary memory of the Crimean War.

The physical legacy survives too. Farringford on the Isle of Wight has been restored and opened to visitors, the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln holds the family's library and manuscripts, and a granite monument on the down above Freshwater, now called Tennyson Down, marks his favorite walk ^[7]. Readers who begin with any Alfred, Lord Tennyson biography usually end at the poems themselves, where the case for him has always rested: on sound, on feeling, and on lines that refuse to be forgotten ^[3].