Alfred Tennyson biography

Dromo's Den

Alfred Tennyson Biography

TENNYSON, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson (1809–92). The most representative English poet of Victoria’s reign. He was born on August 6, 1809, at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, a village of which his father was rector. Two of his brothers also displayed no slight poetic gifts, Frederick (q.v.), and Charles, afterward known as Charles Tennyson Turner (q.v.). Alfred spent four years (1816–20) at the grammar school of Louth, a few miles from his home, and for the next eight years his education was directed by his father, a man of some literary talent. He roamed the country round, delighting in the rural charm of the neighborhood, and laying the foundations of that full and minute knowledge of nature for which his verse is conspicuous, read extensively, and tried his hand in the manner of Pope, Thomson, Scott, Moore, and Byron. Fragments of this early work found their way into Poems by Two Brothers (1827; reprinted 1893), written in conjunction with his brother Charles. In 1828 the two brothers entered Trinity College, Cambridge, to which Frederick had gone a year earlier. At the university Tennyson was associated with a remarkable group of young men, most of whom formed the famous society known as The Apostles. To this group belonged Thackeray, Spedding, Trench, Monckton Milnes, afterward Lord Houghton, Merivale, Alford, and Arthur Henry Hallam, son of the historian, who discerned his friend’s genius and in 1829 told Gladstone that Tennyson "promised fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century."

In that same year, with Timbuctoo, a poem in blank verse, Tennyson won the Chancellor's gold medal, and while still in residence published the epoch-making volume of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. In 1830, when the slim little book appeared, poetry seemed to be dead, and the novel, under the impulse of the unprecedented success of the Waverley series, held the field. Showing the influence of Coleridge and Keats, the poems in this volume were by no means essentially imitative; rather, they contain in germ nearly all of Tennyson's great original qualities. In the same year he traveled in the Pyrenees with Hallam, and there, in the valley of Cauterets, he wrote parts of "Œnone."

He left Cambridge without a degree in February, 1831, for various reasons, but chiefly the ill health of his father, who died a few weeks later. The family, however, remained at Somersby for six years longer. The second volume of Poems (1833) contained many of his choicest minor pieces: "The Lady of Shalott," "The Miller's Daughter," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos-Eaters," and "A Dream of Fair Women." Except by his friends, the collection was not well received; Lockhart wrote an especially brutal review in the Quarterly for April. In September a lifelong sorrow fell upon the poet in the death of Hallam, his dearest friend, who was engaged to his sister Emily. For ten years he remained silent, reading largely, revising old poems, and writing new ones. By 1836 he had definitely given his heart to his future wife, Emily Sarah Sellwood, the sister of his brother Charles's wife. But, though deficiency of income seemed an insuperable bar to marriage, and though her relatives forbade even correspondence, Tennyson had no thought of deserting the art to which his life belonged to take up a profession more lucrative.

In 1842 he gained his public with Poems in two volumes, representing a wide range of theme and metrical structure. Here first appeared "Morte d'Arthur," the first sketch of the Idylls of the King; "Ulysses," "Locksley Hall," "Godiva," "Break, break, break," and "The Two Voices." Tennyson's place in English poetry was now secure; but fortune seemed far off. His capital was shattered by a strange investment in wood-carving machinery; and in 1845 Peel was moved by Lord Houghton to grant him a civil-list pension of £200. In 1847 appeared The Princess, a romantic medley in musical blank verse, marked by his "curious felicity" of style, and containing, in its third (1850) edition, some wonderful lyrics. The year 1850 has been called his annus mirabilis. In June he published In Memoriam, a tribute to the memory of Arthur Hallam. At first not well understood, it has now definitely taken its place with Lycidas, Adonais, and Thyrsis among the great English elegies. In the same month he married Miss Sellwood (with whom, he said afterward, "the peace of God came into my life"); and in November he was appointed poet laureate, succeeding Wordsworth. He settled with his bride at Twickenham, where he lived until (in 1853) he leased and shortly afterward purchased the estate of Farringford, near Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, where he was wont to live for a part at least of each year for the rest of his life. After 1870 he divided his time between Farringford and Aldworth, a house which he built on Blackdown Hill, near Haslemere.

In 1855 appeared Maud, and Other Poems. "Maud," a great favorite with Tennyson, puzzled the critics, who tried to find in it the result of the author's own experience, though it is rather a vivid dramatic conception, rare with Tennyson. "No modern poem," said Jowett, "contains more lines that ring in the ears of men." The same volume contained the popular "Brook" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Returning to Arthurian legend, Tennyson published in 1859 four of the Idylls of the King; others were added in 1869, and in 1872 they were arranged in sequence, with a completion in "Balin and Balan" (1885). Though his conception of the Arthurian romances has been severely criticized, and though it must be confessed that his favorite heroes have here something of the aspect of carpet knights, the Idylls still remain on the whole a fine achievement and in scattered passages quite above criticism. Enoch Arden (1864) was the most immediately popular of all his volumes; sixty thousand copies were sold, and the title poem was translated into eight languages. From the epic Tennyson turned to the drama, producing Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1876), and Becket (1844). Besides these imposing historical pieces are The Falcon (1884), The Cup (1884), The Promise of May (1886), and The Foresters (1892), of which The Cup was the most successful as an acting play. Tennyson's productive imagination continued active throughout his last years. His last volumes were Ballads and Other Poems (1880), containing "Rizpah" and "The Northern Cobbler"; Tiresias and Other Poems (1885); Demeter and Other Poems (1889), containing "Crossing the Bar"; and the posthumous Death of Œnone and Other Poems (1892).

In 1884, after some hesitation, the poet accepted a peerage. He died at Aldworth, Oct. 6, 1892, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

No English poet has produced masterpieces in so many different kinds as Tennyson; he is the representative figure in literature of the Victorian era, because he touched and reconciled a greater number of its diverse interests than any other writer. Yet he is in constant protest against the individualism which that period inherited from the Romantic revival. The most salient feature of his mental attitude is his sense of law; it is the "reign of law" as shown by modern science which most attracts him to scientific subjects. The consummate artistic excellence of his verse, resembling in many of its qualities that of Vergil, gives him an abiding place in literature. No better example exists in English of the eclectic style made up of elements inherited from many of his great predecessors, emulating "by turns the sweet felicity of Keats, the tender simplicity of Wordsworth, the straightforward vigor of Burns, the elusive melody and dreamlike magic of Coleridge, the stormy sweep of Byron, the large majesty of Milton"; and he expressed, with such an instrument, a teaching which was uniformly pure, noble and consoling.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 104-105.