Tennyson, Alfred (1809–1892)

English poet. He was poet laureate 1850–92. His verse has a majestic, musical quality, and few poets have surpassed his precision and delicacy of language. His works include ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1833), ‘The Lotus Eaters’ (1833), ‘Ulysses’ (1842), ‘Break, Break, Break’ (1842), and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854); the longer narratives Locksley Hall (1832) and Maud (1855); the elegy In Memoriam (1850); and a long series of poems on the Arthurian legends, The Idylls of the King (1859–89). Tennyson's poetry is characterized by a wide range of interests; an intense sympathy with the deepest feelings and aspirations of humanity; an exquisite sense of beauty; and a marvellous power of vivid and minute description, often achieved by a single phrase, and heightened by the perfect matching of sense and sound.

He was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, and educated at Cambridge. An unhappy childhood and youth may account for his remarkable sensitivity, depression, and melancholia in later years. The death of English writer Arthur Hallam (a close friend during his years at Cambridge) in 1833 prompted the elegiac, mournful sequence In Memoriam, which grew over the years into a record of spiritual conflict and a confession of faith; it was finally published (anonymously) in 1850, the year in which he succeeded English poet William Wordsworth as poet laureate and married Emily Sellwood (1811–1889). He was made a peer in 1884. Tennyson lived on the Isle of Wight from 1853–69; he then built a house at Aldworth, near Haslemere, Surrey, which was his home until his death.

An early work was the volume Poems by Two Brothers (1827), published with his brother Charles. At Cambridge, Tennyson won the chancellor's medal for English verse (1829), and the following year he produced a volume of Poems Chiefly Lyrical, containing some verse of great promise. In 1830 he toured Europe with Arthur Hallam, and the impressions he gained inspired many of his works. In 1833 he published Poems including ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The Lotus Eaters’, and ‘A Dream of Fair Women’; the volume was generally liked and acclaimed by Tennyson's friends, but was virulently attacked in the Edinburgh Quarterly. In 1842 he published another volume of Poems, containing ‘Locksley Hall’ and ‘Ulysses’. The Princess (1847), a serio-comic epic containing some of his finest lyrical poems, was his first popular success, running through five editions in six years.

The ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ appeared in 1852 and was followed by ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, showing the jingoistic (chauvinistic) aspect of Tennyson's work. They were published in the volume Maud and other Poems (1855), which contained a number of fine pieces. ‘Maud’, an extraordinary study of murderous instincts and insanity, has powerful passages and some beautiful lyrics. The Idylls of the King contain some of Tennyson's most telling descriptive passages and have a musical quality, but lack the vigour and fire of Thomas Malory's interpretation of the legends. His later poems included Enoch Arden, and Other Poems (1864), Tiresias (1885), Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After (1886), Demeter and Other Poems (1889), including ‘Crossing the Bar’, and The Death of Oenone (1892).