Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron Tennyson 1809-92
English poet

Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire, the fourth son of the rector of Somersby. His elder brothers, Frederick and Charles, also wrote poetry. He was educated at Louth Grammar School, and in 1827 went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a member of an ardent group of young men that included his friend Arthur Hallam (1811-33). In 1829 he won a prize with the blank-verse poem 'Timbuctoo', but his other early ventures in verse, Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1833), were slighted by the critics of the day as being too sentimental; the critics also failed to recognize a great poet in the first version of 'The Lady of Shallott', 'Oenone', 'The Lotus-eaters' and other poems in the 1833 volume. Nine years of revising these poems and adding fresh material resulted in the volume of Poems of 1842, which established Tennyson's fame.

A greater achievement was the completion of the elegiac poem In Memoriam (1850), begun on the sudden death of Hallam abroad in 1833. Also in 1850 he succeeded William Wordsworth as Poet Laureate and married Emily Sarah Sellwood. In 1853 he settled in a house on the Isle of Wight, Farringford, where he wrote 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', and in 1868 built Aldworth in Sussex as a summer home. He was flattered by the homage of the entire nation from Queen Victoria downwards, such was his popularity. He undertook short tours with his wife, but rarely left his Victorian England.

After 1850 he devoted himself to the fashionable verse novelette: Maud: a Monodrama (1855), Enoch Arden (1864), and Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886). From 1859 to 1885 he published Idylls of the King (1859), a sequence of poems based on Arthurian legend that were extremely popular, but now seem somewhat compromised by the imposition of Victorian morality on the old chivalric matter.

In the 1870s he wrote a number of plays, of which Becket, produced by Sir Henry Irving in 1893, was the most successful. He continued to write poetry, and his last poem was a 16-line lyric written in 1889 while crossing from Lymington to the Isle of Wight, Crossing the Bar.

Bibliography: Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir (1897); T R Lousbury, The Life and Times of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1809-1850 (1862). For a modern assessment, see R B Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980) and C Ricks, Tennyson (1972).