Alfred, Lord Tennyson

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August 1809 in Somersby, a small village in Lincolnshire, and by the time he died on the 6th of October 1892, lines from his poems had entered everyday English speech so thoroughly that most people who use them have no idea where they came from. "Nature, red in tooth and claw." "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." These are Tennyson's words. He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, yet the man himself is often reduced to a portrait in a top hat. Who was he, really? What drove a poet who barely graduated Cambridge to become the longest-serving Poet Laureate in British history? And what grief, running beneath the surface of his most celebrated work, shaped almost everything he ever wrote?

• 2. The Boy from Somersby

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  George Clayton Tennyson, Alfred's father, was a man of "superior abilities and varied attainments" who tried his hand at architecture, painting, music, and poetry, all while serving as an Anglican rector. He raised a large family in Lincolnshire and spent summers on the eastern coast at Mablethorpe and Skegness. Yet despite his talents, he had been pushed aside as the family heir in favour of his younger brother Charles, a slight that left its mark on the household. Alfred's grandfather, also named George Tennyson, was an attorney and member of Parliament who had accumulated significant property and married into the Clayton family of Lincolnshire.

  Tennyson himself later said that as a boy he was "an enormous admirer of Byron". He and two of his elder brothers were writing poetry in their teens, and when Alfred was just seventeen, a collection of poems by all three of them was published locally. That volume, Poems by Two Brothers, appeared in 1827, though the title page was dated 1827 on the cover. One of those brothers, Charles Tennyson Turner, would later marry Louisa Sellwood, whose elder sister Emily would eventually become Alfred's wife. Another brother, Edward, was institutionalised in a private asylum, a shadow the family carried quietly.

  The psychologist William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, quoted at length from Tennyson's account of a recurring experience: a kind of "waking trance" that came upon him from boyhood, triggered simply by repeating his own name aloud, in which "individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being". Tennyson called it "the clearest, the surest of the sure" and said it was "utterly beyond words". That inward intensity would surface again and again in his verse.

• 3. Cambridge and a Gold Medal

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  Tennyson attended King Edward VI Grammar School in Louth from 1816 to 1820, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827. There he joined a secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles, and there he met the two people who would define the first half of his adult life: Arthur Hallam and William Henry Brookfield, who became his closest friends.

  In 1829, when Tennyson was twenty years old, he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for a poem called "Timbuktu". The medal was considered no small honour for someone his age. The following year he published his first solo collection, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, which contained fifty-six poems, including "Claribel" and "Mariana", two works that remain among his most celebrated. Some critics dismissed the collection as overly sentimental, but the poems reached the right eyes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among the established writers who took notice of the young poet from Lincolnshire.

  Tennyson's early verse, with its medievalism and dense visual imagery, struck a nerve with a rising generation of painters and artists. In 1848, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt compiled a list of "Immortals" they admired. Tennyson appeared alongside John Keats. The poem "The Lady of Shalott" alone became a subject for Rossetti, Hunt, Elizabeth Siddal, and John William Waterhouse, who painted it three times.

• 4. Arthur Hallam and the Long Silence

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  In the spring of 1831, Tennyson's father died, forcing him to leave Cambridge without taking his degree. He returned to Somersby to help support his widowed mother and the family, sharing the responsibilities of the household. Arthur Hallam came to stay that summer and became engaged to Tennyson's sister, Emilia.

  In 1833, Tennyson published a second collection of poetry, which included the first version of "The Lady of Shalott". The volume met heavy criticism. Tennyson was so discouraged that he did not publish again for ten years, though he kept writing throughout that period. That same year brought a blow that no critical hostility could match. Hallam died suddenly while on holiday in Vienna, aged just twenty-two, after a cerebral haemorrhage.

  Hallam's death would haunt Tennyson for the rest of his writing life. It prompted poems including "In the Valley of Cauteretz", and it seeded the work that would become his masterpiece: "In Memoriam A.H.H.", a long meditation on grief, faith, and the soul that he worked on for seventeen years before publishing it in 1850. During the decade of silence that followed the 1833 collection, Tennyson's family moved to Beech Hill Park in Epping Forest, Essex, around 1837. A family account describes him skating on a pond in the park in winter, gliding across the ice in a long blue cloak, reluctant to leave his anxious mother alone even for a night in London. He befriended a Dr Allen, who ran a nearby asylum whose patients included the poet John Clare. An unwise investment in Allen's wood-carving enterprise soon cost Tennyson much of the family fortune and brought on a serious depression.

• 5. In Memoriam and the Laureateship

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  On the 14th of May 1842, Tennyson published a two-volume collection called Poems. The first volume reprinted earlier work; the second was made up almost entirely of new poems. The collection brought immediate success. "Locksley Hall", "Break, Break, Break", "Ulysses", and a revised "Lady of Shalott" all appeared here and earned lasting recognition. A satirical long poem, "The Princess: A Medley", followed in 1847, popular enough that W. S. Gilbert adapted and parodied it twice: in The Princess in 1870, and again in Princess Ida in 1884.

  Then came 1850, the year that settled everything. Tennyson published In Memoriam A.H.H., the elegy for Hallam he had been carrying inside him for seventeen years. Queen Victoria, after Prince Albert's death, wrote in her diary that she was "much soothed and pleased" by reading it. Later that year, after William Wordsworth's death and Samuel Rogers' refusal, and ahead of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Leigh Hunt, who had also been considered, Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate. In the same year, on the 13th of June, he married Emily Sellwood in Shiplake, a woman he had known since childhood. They would have two sons: Hallam, born on the 11th of August 1852 and named after his father's closest friend, and Lionel, born on the 16th of March 1854.

  Tennyson held the Laureateship until his death in 1892, the longest tenure of any poet in that role. Among his official duties he wrote a poem welcoming Princess Alexandra of Denmark when she arrived in Britain to marry the future King Edward VII.

• 6. The Charge and the Craft

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  In 1855, Tennyson produced "The Charge of the Light Brigade", a tribute to the British cavalrymen who rode into a disastrous assault on the 25th of October 1854, during the Crimean War. An early recording exists of Tennyson reading the poem aloud. It became one of the most recognisable works of Victorian poetry, and it illustrated something essential about how Tennyson worked: he understood rhythm as a physical force. The insistent beat of "Break, Break, Break", as one critical observation put it, was not accidental. It was chosen to match the relentless sadness of the subject.

  Robert Browning, his contemporary, described Tennyson's habit of polishing and revising his manuscripts as "insane", a symptom of "mental infirmity". What Browning found excessive, scholars now recognise as a dynamic creative process. The many notebooks Tennyson worked in reveal a constant renegotiation between image and word. Few English poets attempted such a range of metres. Like other Victorian poets, he experimented with adapting the quantitative metres of Greek and Latin verse to English, and he brought to that experiment, as T. S. Eliot wrote, a technical mastery that gave a "surface" to his poetry's "depths, to the abyss of sorrow". Eliot called him "the saddest of all English poets".

  Idylls of the King, his retelling of the Arthurian legends composed between 1833 and 1874, is widely considered the most famous Victorian treatment of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Its composition stretched across more than four decades, overlapping with almost every other major work of his life. Arthur Hallam's name lives inside it, embedded in the title of the son Tennyson named in his honour.

• 7. Politics, Faith, and the Final Years

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  Tennyson declined a baronetcy from Benjamin Disraeli in 1865 and again in 1868, but eventually accepted a peerage in 1883 at William Ewart Gladstone's earnest solicitation. On the 11th of March 1884 he took his seat in the House of Lords as Baron Tennyson, of Aldworth in Sussex and of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. His family were Whigs by tradition. He believed society should progress through gradual reform, not revolution, and he applied that belief to universal suffrage: he did not reject it outright, but held it should come only after the population had been properly prepared for self-government. When the Reform Act 1832 passed, he broke into a local church to ring the bells in celebration.

  His religious convictions were equally complicated. Near the end of his life he acknowledged that his beliefs leaned toward agnosticism and what he called pandeism. In In Memoriam he wrote: "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds." In Maud, published in 1855, he wrote: "The churches have killed their Christ." In his diary he recorded: "I believe in Pantheism of a sort." On his deathbed in 1892, he praised the philosopher Giordano Bruno, saying, "His view of God is in some ways mine."

  Tennyson rented Farringford House on the Isle of Wight in 1853 and eventually bought it. He later built a second home at Aldworth in West Sussex in 1869, retreating there when too many visitors crowded Farringford, though he returned to the island for winters. He continued writing into his eighties. His last words, spoken at Aldworth, were: "Oh that press will have me now!" He was buried at Westminster Abbey. He left an estate of £57,206. His son Hallam, who had been named for Arthur Hallam, produced an authorised biography of his father in 1897 and later served as the second Governor-General of Australia.