Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-1892)

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-1892)

English poet, considered the most representative of the Victorian age in England, appointed poet laureate in 1850. Tennyson, in his early career influenced by the English romantic poets, especially John Keats, is known for his faithful reflection in his poetry of the artistic and cultural tastes and the intellectual and moral values of his time and of the dominant Victorian social class, as well as for the characteristic response of his time and class to the encroachments of science in the domain of religious faith. He was the favorite target for the attacks of English and American poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who rebelled against Victorian standards, denouncing him for sentimentality, insipidity, over-ornateness, and narrow patriotism. Later in the 20th century critics began to praise Tennyson for the metrical skill and distinguished imagery of some of his brief lyrics, regarded as unimportant in his own day.

Tennyson's works include the following: Poems by Two Brothers ( 1827), early verse by his brothers and himself; Poems, Chiefly Lyrical ( 1830); Poems ( 1832); Poems ( 1842); Locksley Hall ( 1842); The Princess ( 1847); In Memorandum ( 1850); Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington ( 1852); Maud ( 1855); Idylls of the King ( 1859-1872); Enoch Arden ( 1864), a sentimental verse narrative; Queen Mary ( 1875), Harold ( 1876), and Becket ( 1884), historical tragedies in verse; Tiresias, And Other Poems ( 1885); Locksley Hall Sixty Years After ( 1886); Demeter, And Other Poems ( 1889): The Death of Oenone ( 1892). Among his best-known single poems are The Lady of Shalott; The Lotos-Eaters; Ulysses: Break, Break, Break; Sweet and Low; Tears. Idle Tears; The Charge of the Light Brigade; The Brook; Come into the Garden, Maud; Northern Farmer, a dialect poem; The Higher Pantheism; and Crossing the Bar. Cf. Tennyson ( 1923), by Harold Nicolson.

Tennyson was immensely popular and successful throughout his entire later career. The one shadow in his life was the early death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, which plunged him into a conflict between faith and doubt.