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Alfred Tennyson 1809-1892 - 1st Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Freshwater |
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English author often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. Alfred Tennyson succeeded William Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850; he was appointed by Queen Victoria and served 42 years. Tennyson's works were melancholic, and reflected the moral and intellectual values of his time. Half a league, half a league, Alfred,
Lord Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the
fourth
of twelve children. His father, George Clayton Tennyson, was a
clergyman and rector, who was notoriously absentminded and suffered
from depression. His dark moods cast a shadow over the family home.
Tennyson's mother, Elizabeth (née Fytche), was a reverend's daughter. The young Alfred began to write poetry at an
early age in the style of Lord Byron. His first drama in blank verse he
wrote at fourteen. After four unhappy school years at Louth,
where he was bullied by fellow-students, he was tutored at
home. Tennyson then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, but he did not aim at academic excellence. He joined the literary club 'The Apostles,' where he met Arthur Hallam, who became his closest friend. The undergraduate society discussed contemporary social, religious, scientific, and literary issues. Encouraged by 'The Apostles,' Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), which included the popular 'Mariana.' The well-connnected Hallam, with whom Tennyson travelled on the Continent, said in his anonymous review: "There is a strange earnestness in his worship of beauty which throws a charm over his impassioned song, more easily felt than described, and not to be escaped by those who have once felt it." ('On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson' by Henry Hallam, Englishman's Magazine, August 1831) By 1830, his friend had become engaged to his sister Emily. After his father's death in 1831, Tennyson returned to Somersby without a degree. Poems (1833), Tennyson's next book, received
unfavorable reviews, and he ceased to publish for nearly ten years.
Hallam died suddenly on the same year in Vienna. It was a heavy blow to
Tennyson. He began to write In Memoriam for his lost friend – the
work took seventeen years to finish. A revised volume of Poems,
which included the 'The Lady of Shalott' and 'The Lotus-eaters'. 'Morte
d'Arthur' and 'Ulysses' appeared in the two-volume Poems (1842),
and established his reputation as a writer. In 'Ulysses' Tennyson
portrayed the Greek after his travels, longing past days: "How dull it
is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in
use!" The Grail romances did not appeal to Tennyson's imagination and
he came to write of the Holy Grail in the Idylls of the King
(1859) reluctantly: "As to Macaulay's suggestion of the Sangreal I
doubt whether such a subject could be handled in these days, without
incurring a charge of irreverence. It would be too much like playing
with sacred things," he explained in a letter to the duke of Argyll in October 1859. (The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson: Volume II: 1851-1870, edited by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., 1989, p. 244) During his later years Tennyson produced some of his best
poems.
After marrying in 1850 Emily Sellwood, whom Tennyson had already
met in 1830 and who had been the object of his affection for a long
time, the couple settled in 1853 in Farringford, a house in Freshwater
on the Isle of Wright. From there the family moved in 1869 to Aldworth,
Surrey. Tennyson's life was then uneventful. Emily ran two houses, provided lavish meals, and pampered her husband, who feared what he called "the black blood of the Tennysons" – "I am black-blooded like all the Tennysons. I remember all the malignant things said against me, but little of the praise," he said of himself. (Tennyson as Seen by His Parodists by Dr J. Postma, 1966, p. 86) In London he was a regular guest of the literary and artistic salon of Mrs Prinsep at Little Holland House. Tennyson's mother died in 1865. On the funeral day he wrote in his diary: "We all of us hate the pompous funeral we have to join in, black plumes, black coaches and nonsense. We should like all to go in white and gold rather, but convention is against us." (Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir: Volume 2 by Hallam Tennyson, 2012, pp. 18-19) Among Tennyson's major poetic achievements the elegy mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, In Memoriam (1850). The personal sorrow led the poet to explore his thoughts on faith, immortality, and the meaning of loss: "O life as futile, then, as frail! / O for thy voice to soothe and bless! / What hope of answer, or redress? / Behind the veil, behind the veil." (In Memoriam, edited, with notes, by William J. Rolfe, Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1895, p. 63) Among its other passages is a symbolic voyage ending in a vision of Hallam as the poet's muse. Some critics have seen in the work ideas that anticipated Darwin's theory of natural selection: "Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation's final law – / Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravin, shriek'd against his creed – ". (Ibid., p. 62) Tennyson was born in the same year as Darwin, but his view about natural history, however, was based on catastrophe theory, not evolution. 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' was first published in The Examiner, on December 9, 1854 and included Maud (1855). At first Maudwas found obscure or morbid by critics ranging from George Eliot to Gladstone, but 'The Charge' became one of Tennyson's most frequently quoted works. It also inspired Michael Curtiz's adventure movie from 1936, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Its second title card stated: "The world is indebted to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria of Great Britain, for perpetuating in an epic poem one of the most distinguished events in history conspicuous for sheer valor . . . "Curtiz's film had little to do with the actual charge. The scenes were shot in California, not in the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Historically the Battle of Balaclava during the
Crimean war brough to light the incompetent organization of the English
army. But the historical facts were not Tennyson's reason for writing his famous work; the
stupid mistake described by the poet (it was put casually: "Not tho' the soldiers knew / Some one had blunder'd") honored the
soldier's courage and heroic action. Tennyson picked up the word "blunder" from a Times
Leader article: "The British soldier will do his duty, even to certain
death, and is not paralyzed by feeling that he is the victim of some
hideous blunder." ('"The Charge of the Light Brigade": The Creation of a Poem' by Edgar Shannon and Christopher Ricks, in Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 38, 1985, pp. 1-44) During his later years Tennyson produced some of his most acclaimed works. Enoch Arden (1864) was based on a true story of a sailor, thought to be drowned at sea but who returned home after several years obly to find that his wife had remarried. In the poem Enoch Arden, Philip Ray and Annie Lee grow up together. Enoch wins her hand. He sails abroad and is shipwrecked for 10 years on a deserted island. Meanwhile Annie has been reduced to poverty. Philip asks her to marry him. Enoch returns and witnesses their happiness, but hides that he is alive and sacrifices his happiness for theirs. An Enoch Arden has come to mean a person who truly loves someone better than himself. The poem ends simply with the lines, "So past the strong heoic soul away. / And when they buried him, the little port / Had seldom seen a costlier funeral." Idylls of the King (1859-1885) dealt with the Arthurian legeds, and The Ancient Sage (1885) and Akbar's Dream (1892) testified the poet's faith in the redemption offered by love. Despite Tennyson pessimism about the human condition, he believed in God. In the 1870s Tennyson wrote several plays, among them the poetic
dramas Queen Mary (1875) and Harold
(1876). In 1884 he was created a baron. Tennyson died at Aldwort on
October 6, 1892, and was buried in the Poets' Corner in Westminster
Abbey. Soon he became the favorite target of attacks of many English
and American writers, who saw him as a representative of narrow patriotism
and sentimentality. Although Tennyson suffered from a reputation as
"Queen Victoria's lapdog" in his own country, his poetry exerted real
influence in France, and was translated into German and Italy, despite
having the disadvantage of being difficult to translate to other
languages. In Russia his poems containing a message of reform were most
popular. Later critics have praised again Tennyson. T.S.
Eliot wrote that "I do not believe for a moment that Tennyson was a man
of mild feelings or weak passions. There is no evidence in his poetry
that he knew the experience of violent passion for a woman; but there
is plenty of evidence of emotional intensity and violence – but of
emotion so deeply suppressed, even from himelf, as to tend rather
towards the blackest melancholia than towards dramatic action." (Essays Ancient and Modern, 1936, p. 181) For further reading: Tennyson: Aspects of His Life by Harold Nicholson (1923); Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son by Hallam T. Tennyson (1940); Alfred Tennyson by Sir Charles Tennyson (1949); Tennyson by Jerome H. Buckley (1960); Tennyson Laureate by Valerie Pitt (1962); The Two Voices by Elton E. Smith (1964); Tennyson by C. Ricks (1972); Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart by R.B. Martin (1980); Lady Tennyson's Journal, ed. James O. Hoge (1981); Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism by Herbert F. Tucker (1988); Anglo-American Antiphony: The Late Romanticism of Tennyson and Emerson by Richard E. Brantley (1994); Tennyson, edited by Rebecca Stott (1996); Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Poet in an Age of Theory by W. David Shaw (1997); Tennyson and His Circle by Lynne Truss (1999); Alfred Tennyson by Andrew Lang (2001); Tennyson: To Strive, To Seek, To Find by John Batchelor (2012); Tennyson and the Fabrication of Englishness by Marion Sherwood (2013); The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe, edited by Leonee Ormond (2017); Alfred Tennyson: a Companion by Laurence W. Mazzeno (2020); The Crimean War in Victorian Poetry by Tai-Chun Ho (2021); Letters and Lives of the Tennyson Women by Marion Sherwood and Rosalind Boyce (2023) Selected works:
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