Lord Alfred Tennyson

Lord Alfred Tennyson

Lord Alfred Tennyson was the most popular British poet of the Victorian era, even though he avoided the public life. “Tennyson earned his position in literature because of the remarkable range of his talents and his dedication throughout his long career to perfecting his art.” “Tennyson’s long list of works showed his consistent inspiration and creative vitality, beginning with poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and extending to The Death of Oenone and Other Poems, published after his death more than 60 years later” (Dunn 169). Tennyson's works were melancholic, and reflected the moral and intellectual values of his time, which made them especially vulnerable for later criticism. His father took notice of Alfred’s potential to write excellent poetical lyrics while at an early age.

Born August 6, 1809, Alfred Tennyson was the fourth of twelve children of a Lincolnshire rector and a vicar’s daughter. At the early age of seven he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother at Louth to attend the grammar school there. Alfred was only there until the age of eleven when he returned to the family home at Somersby (Kunitz 610). At the young age of twelve, he wrote a 6,000-line epic poem. His father, the Reverend George Tennyson, tutored his sons in classical and modern languages. His father was a man of culture, and he early recognized the remarkable promise of this boy who was a voracious reader and a talented author. “If Alfred die,” the father remarked when the son was only in his early teens, “one of our greatest poets will have gone” (Kunitz 610). In the 1820s, however, Tennyson's father began to suffer frequent mental breakdowns that were exacerbated by alcoholism. “One of Tennyson's brothers had violent quarrels with his father, a second was later confined to an insane asylum, and another became an opium addict” (Everett 1).

In 1828, Alfred, with his closest brother Charles, matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where their brother Frederick was already a student. He studied there less than three years, and seemed to not have learned a great deal, and disliked Cambridge heartily. In 1830, Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and in 1832 he published a second volume entitled simply Poems. “A scathing critism of the poems published in 1833, made by the Quarterly Review, so depressed the sensitive poet that he didn’t publish another volume for nine years.” This was separate from his poem Timbuctoo that had earlier won him the Chancelor’s medal for English verse. However, his university days gave him the greatest friendship of his life, that with Arthur Hallam (Kunitz 610).

“Tennyson’s sensitive imagination was ever responsive to the moral atmosphere around him. It was the high seriousness of Hallam and his Cambridge friends, their sympathy with moral and political progress, which had encouraged him to endeavour, even too strenuously, to charge his work with didactic intention, which had made him to strive, often against his deepest instincts and prejudices, to sympathize with the claims of advancing democracy…” (Wood 40).

In 1832 Hallam and Tennyson traveled together on the Rhine River, as two years earlier they had toured the Pyrenees River (Kunitz 610). He and Tennyson knew each other only four years, but their intense friendship had major influence on the poet. On a visit to Somersby, Hallam met and later became engaged to Alfred’s sister, Emily Tennyson, and the two friends looked forward to a life-long companionship. Hallam's death from illness in 1833 (he was only 22) shocked Tennyson profoundly, and his grief lead to most of his best poetry, including In Memoriam , The Passing of Arthur, Ulysses, and Tithonus. “Tennyson’s grief was dreadful. Hallam had been to him another self, a nearer being than even his beloved brothers. Although Tennyson proved himself the most affectionate and faithful of husbands and the most devoted of fathers, the romance and passion of his nature turned not to women, but to his men friends. He had besides a broad streak of melancholy in his personality, and for a while Hallam’s sudden snatching away drove him close to suicide” (Kunitz 611).

In 1836, Charles Tennyson married, and one of the bridesmaids was his bride’s sister, Emily Sellwood. “Alfred Tennyson met her on this occasion and there seems to have been no thought from the beginning in the mind of either but that they were intended as lifelong companions” (Kunitz 610). They became engaged. When he lost his inheritance on a bad investment in 1840, Sellwood's family called off the engagement and forbade their correspondence because he had no income sufficient to provide for a wife (Kunitz 611). During this time Tennyson continued to write, poetry being as natural an expression to him as breathing; he published sparsely in the magazines, and in 1842 with the success