1.4 Lord Alfred Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson an English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884.

Tennyson was the fourth of 12 children, born into an old Lincolnshire family, his father a rector. Alfred, with two of his brothers, Frederick and Charles, was sent in 1815 to Louth grammar school—where he was unhappy. He left in 1820, but, though home conditions were difficult, his father managed to give him a wide literary education. Alfred was precocious (early in development), and before his teens he had composed in the styles of Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, and John Milton. To his youth also belongs The Devil and the Lady (a collection of previously unpublished poems published posthumously in 1930), which shows an astonishing understanding of Elizabethan dramatic verse. Lord Byron was a dominant influence on the young Tennyson.

He made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more recent writing. The collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.

In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late-Romantic subject matter. The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the 1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him vulnerable to accusations from less sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of 1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a technique developed independently by both Tennyson and Browning in the 1830s and the greatest formal innovation in Victorian poetry. The other is the form that Tennyson called the English Idyl, in which he combined brilliant vignettes of contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.

In the major poems of his middle period Tennyson combined the larger scale required by his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short ones. In Memoriam is a vast poem of 131 sections of varying length, with a prologue and epilogue. Inspired by the grief Tennyson felt at the untimely death of his friend Hallam, the poem touches on many intellectual issues of the Victorian Age as the author searches for the meaning of life and death and tries to come to terms with his sense of loss. Most notably, In Memoriam reflects the struggle to reconcile traditional religious faith and belief in immortality with the emerging theories of evolution and modern geology.

Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859, revised 1885). An Arthurian epic, it offers a melancholy vision of an idealistic community in decay. Some passages are brilliant, but even Tennyson's contemporaries found it on the whole oddly restrained and lacking in intellectual substance.

G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note was the last thing aimed at by his great contemporary Robert Browning. Browning's work was Germanic rather than Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.