Alfred Lord Tennyson born (1809-1892)

About:

Tennyson was born in Somersby in Lincolnshire. He was the fourth child of the twelve born to Somersby’s rector who’s increasingly drunken and paranoid behaviour (possibly due to his disinheritance from a fairly substantial family fortune), throughout Tennyson’s childhood was to influence his life and his poetry greatly.

Tennyson went up to Cambridge University in 1827 where he became great friends with a similarly talented young poet Arthur Henry Hallam. His first two volumes of poetry were met with chillingly aggressive criticism, Hallam had suggested that Tennyson’s was a new voice, and the influential critics of the day did not like it. The effect of these harsh rejections coupled with the agony for Tennyson of losing Hallam who died in 1833 at the age of 22, stopped Tennyson publishing for ten years. It did not stop him writing however and one of his most popular and enduring poems In Memoriam came directly from his grief.

In 1842 Poems in Two Volumes was released and became a vast success, when In Memoriam was published two years later it’s popularity, particularly with Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert, lead to his being offered the Poet Laureateship on Wordsworth’s death. In the same year he married his childhood sweetheart and long term friend Emily Sellwood and they had two sons over the next four years. Tennyson’s next volume of poetry Maud and Other Poems published in 1855 raised a similar storm of protest to his early work. It was confrontational in its attitude to what Tennyson saw as a greed driven, materialistic society where “only the Ledger lives”.

Tennyson was however now proof against the criticism and his popularity outweighed the critics’ attempts to dismiss his work. His next two volumes, the Arthurian epic The Idylls of the King (1859) and Enoch Arden (1864) were vastly successful and he lived the final thirty years of his life as one would expect of a Victorian laureate, surrounded by grandeur, royalty and eventually after several refusals a baronetcy in 1884.

He died in 1892, in fittingly poetic style with Shakespeare’s Cymbeline on his lap open at the lines ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul/Till the tree die.’