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Alfred Tennyson

Alfred Lord Tennyson was born in 1809 at Somersby, Lincolnshire, the sixth of eleven children of a clergyman. He went up to Cambridge in 1828 but did not obtain a degree. He never had any other occupation than poet. In 1850 he was created Poet Laureate and in 1883 he accepted a peerage. His first important book, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, was published in 1830, and was not a critical success, but his two volumes of Poems, 1842, which contain some of his finest work, established him as the leading poet of his generation. Nine years earlier his close friend Arthur Hallam had died and this event had a lasting influence on his life and writing.

In Memoriam, a series of lyrics and speculations on mortality in tribute to Hallam, appeared in 1850. This was followed in 1855 by Maud, judged by many to be as important as In Memoriam, and which J. R. Lowell described as ‘the antiphonal voice to In Memoriam’. The principal work of Tennyson’s later years, Idylls of the King, was composed in two creative spells (1856–9 and 1868–74). T. S. Eliot wrote of Tennyson: ‘He has three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety and complete competence. He had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton.’ After a short illness Tennyson died in 1892 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.