(It is a requiem for the poet's beloved Cambridge friend A...)
It is a requiem for the poet's beloved Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833. It contains some of Tennyson's most accomplished lyrical work, and is an unusually sustained exercise in lyric verse. It is widely considered to be one of the great poems of the 19th century.
(Idylls of the King traces the story of Arthur's rule, fro...)
Idylls of the King traces the story of Arthur's rule, from his first encounter with Guinevere and the quest for the Holy Grail to the adultery of his Queen with Launcelot and the King's death in a final battle that spells the ruin of his kingdom.
(This volume offers one of the most comprehensive surveys ...)
This volume offers one of the most comprehensive surveys of Tennyson's poetry available for the serious student. It includes selections from the 1830, 1832, and 1842 volumes, together with songs from The Princess and In Memoriam; complete poems from the middle period, including Maud, Enoch Arden, and nine Idylls of the King, including the Dedication; and a generous offering from the late period, 1872-92.
(This collection includes, of course, such famous poems as...)
This collection includes, of course, such famous poems as “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” There are extracts from all the major masterpieces—“Idylls of the King,” “The Princess,” “In Memoriam”—and several complete long poems, such as “Ulysses” and “Demeter and Persephone,” that demonstrate his narrative grace. Finally, there are many of the short lyrical poems, such as “Come into the Garden, Maud” and “Break, Break, Break,” for which he is justly celebrated.
(This authoritative edition brings together a unique combi...)
This authoritative edition brings together a unique combination of Tennyson's poetry and prose, spanning his entire career, from his striking juvenilia, through his career as Poet Laureate, to the powerful poetry he wrote in his ninth decade.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, a British poet, was regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest poet of Victorian England. A superb craftsman in verse, he wrote poetry that ranged from confident assertion to black despair and expressed the emotions, values, and aspirations of the Victorian period.
Background
Alfred Tennyson was born on August 6, 1809, in Somersby, a village in Lincolnshire, England; one of eight sons - there were four daughters as well – of George Clayton Tennyson, a country clergyman, occupying the position of the rector at Somersby, Benniworth and Bag Enderby, and Elizabeth nee Fytche, the daughter of a vicar. Alfred’s second and third elder brothers, Frederick Tennyson and Charles Tennyson Turner, were also poets.
Alfred’s father, George Clayton Tennyson, was the elder of the two sons of a prosperous businessman who favored his younger son and thus left Dr. Tennyson embittered and relatively impoverished. He was an educated man, a country clergyman, and Alfred read widely in his father's library. As Dr. Tennyson grew older, he grew more passionate and melancholy: he took to drink, he suffered from lapses of memory, and he once even tried to kill his eldest son. Misfortune and madness, not surprisingly, haunted the whole Tennyson family. The year he died, Dr. Tennyson said of his children, "They are all strangely brought up."
Education
In 1816, Alfred began his education at King Edward VI Grammar School, a boarding school located in Louth, Lincolnshire. In 1820, when his father began to suffer from frequent mental breakdown owing to excessive drinking, Alfred was brought back to be tutored at home.
Young Alfred began to write poetries from a very early age, in part to take his mind off from the unhappy situation at home. Around the age of 13 or 14, he wrote a six-thousand-line epic in imitation of Sir Walter Scott in addition to a drama in blank verse. Other youthful models were Lord Byron, whose death in 1824 he particularly mourned, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. When he was 14, Tennyson wrote a play called The Devil and the Lady, a dexterous imitation of Elizabethan comic verse.
In 1827 there appeared an unpretentious volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers; the book, despite its title, included poems by three of the Tennyson brothers, a little less than half of them probably by Alfred. That same year Alfred and Charles joined their brother Frederick at Trinity College, Cambridge University. At Cambridge, Alfred Tennyson began to enjoy his life for the first time. In early 1829, at the insistence of his college-mates, he submitted his poetry, ‘Timbuctoo’, set on the subject of Armageddon, for Chancellor's Gold Medal, ultimately winning the award.
The same year Tennyson joined the Apostles, an undergraduate discussion group, some of whose members would over the years continue to be his closest friends. Tennyson's undergraduate days were a time of intellectual and political turmoil in England. The institutions of church and state were being challenged, and the Apostles debated the issues which led to the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. Among the Apostles, Tennyson's closest friend was Arthur Hallam, a wonderfully gifted young man whose early tragic death in 1833 would inspire In Memoriam.
In 1830 the Apostles took up the cause of a group of Spanish revolutionaries; Tennyson and Hallam went to the Pyrenees on an unsuccessful mission to aid the rebels. Pyrenees left a lifelong influence on Tennyson and for the rest of his life mountains remained an important backdrop for many of his poetries. Cauteretz, the mountain village, the valleys and waterfalls, all remained with him till the end. Also in 1830 Tennyson published his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical; of these poems perhaps the best-known and most characteristic is "Mariana," where melancholy is suggested by the depiction of a landscape much like that of Tennyson's native Lincolnshire. Those who knew Tennyson as a university student were impressed by his commanding physical presence and by his youthful literary achievements. In 1831 his father died, and Tennyson left the university without taking a degree.
Later in life the author received honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh. Thrice he had invitation from the University of Cambridge to accept an honorary degree, but declined.
In the volume entitled Poems, which Tennyson published in 1832, a recurring theme is the conflict between a selfish love of beauty and the obligation to serve society. The collection includes "The Lady of Shalott," a narrative set in Arthurian England in which retired estheticism is destroyed by a dangerous "real" world, and "The Palace of Art," an allegory which finally affirms the teaching obligations of the poet. Tennyson was depressed by some of the reviews of this book, and he was cast down by Hallam's death; for the next 10 years he published nothing.
In 1840 he invested what money he had inherited in a scheme for woodworking machinery; by 1843 he had lost his small patrimony. Poems, Two Volumes (1842) presaged a change in Tennyson's fortunes. Here for the first time appeared one of the several poems which would eventually make up the Idylls of the King. Other poems in this collection are "Ulysses," a dramatic monologue in which the aging king urges his companions to undertake a final heroic journey, and "The Two Voices," an interior debate between the death wish and the will to live. Poems, Two Volumes was well received, and Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, who was particularly impressed by "Ulysses," awarded Tennyson a pension which guaranteed him £200 a year.
The Princess: A Medley (1847) is Tennyson's attempt to meet the charge that he had neglected the social responsibilities of the poet. This fable, in some 3,000 lines of blank verse, is a generally lighthearted work - in 1870 William S. Gilbert produced a comic stage version - and Tennyson cautiously advocates a greater appreciation of the feminine intelligence.
The great year of Tennyson's life is 1850: on June 1 he published In Memoriam, the long elegy inspired by the death of Hallam; and in November he was appointed poet laureate to succeed William Wordsworth. Tennyson's years of uncertainty and financial insecurity were over; he became the greatly esteemed poetic spokesman of his age.
In Memoriam is in form a series of 129 lyrics of varying length, all composed in the same stanzaic form. The lyrics may be read individually, rather like the entries in a journal, but the poem has an overall organization. It begins with the death of Hallam, who was engaged to Tennyson's sister, and it ends with the marriage of another sister. Tennyson described it as a "kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness." The poem covers a period of roughly 3 years, punctuated by three celebrations of Christmas. The movement of the poem, though it is as irregular as a fever chart, is from grief through resignation to joy.
With his family Tennyson settled in Farringford on the Isle of Wight in a seclusion frequently interrupted by admiring tourists, many of them Americans. More welcome visitors were his friends Edward Lear, the comic poet; Charles Kingsley, the novelist; Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol College; and even Albert, the Prince Consort, who took away cowslips to make tea for Queen Victoria. Although Tennyson was now settled and prosperous, his next book, Maud and Other Poems (1855), is notable for another study in melancholy. He called the title poem a "monodrama," a form somewhere between a dramatic monologue and a verse play. Tennyson described the poem as a "little Hamlet." The hero of the poem is preoccupied by thoughts of his father's suicide, and his reason is endangered when he accidentally kills the brother of Maud, the girl he loves. The hero then exiles himself to France, and, when he learns of Maud's death, he enlists to fight in the Crimea in the hope that the violence of war will somehow redeem him. The poem is now much admired for its metrical virtuosity and for its dramatization of neurotic states of mind.
Of the other poems in the 1855 volume, the best-known are "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and "The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," certainly the greatest of the poems written by Tennyson in his capacity as poet laureate.
Between 1856 and 1876 Tennyson's principal concern was the composition of a series of linked narrative poems about King Arthur and the Round Table. He worked on this project for more than 20 years: one section was written as early as 1833; another part was not published until 1884. As definitively collected in 1889, The Idylls of the King consists of a dedication to the Prince Consort, 12 blank-verse narratives (the idylls) which deal with Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guenevere, and other figures in the court, and an epilogue addressed to the Queen.
Tennyson had a long and immensely productive literary career, and a chronology shows that he did ambitious work until late in his life. In his 60s he wrote a series of historical verse plays - Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1876), and Becket (1879) - on the "making of England." The plays were intended to revive a sense of national grandeur and to remind the English of their liberation from Roman Catholicism. Tennyson's last years were crowned with many honors.
Towards the end of his life Tennyson revealed that his "religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism". In a characteristically Victorian manner, Tennyson combines a deep interest in contemporary science with an unorthodox, even idiosyncratic, Christian belief. His poem In Memoriam combines private feeling with a perplexity over the future of Christianity which was shared by many of Tennyson's contemporaries.
Politics
Tennyson wrote a substantial quantity of unofficial political verse, from the bellicose "Form, Riflemen, Form", on the French crisis of 1859 and the Creation of the Volunteer Force, to "Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act/of steering", deploring Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. Tennyson's family were Whigs by tradition and Tennyson's own politics fit the Whig mold, although he would also vote for the Liberal Party after the Whigs dissolved. Tennyson believed that society should progress through gradual and steady reform, not revolution, and this attitude was reflected in his attitude toward universal suffrage, which he did not outright reject, but recommended only after the masses had been properly educated and adjusted to self-government. In his The Princess: A Medley Tennyson is concerned with the cause of woman's rights.
Views
Tennyson may be seen as the first great English poet to be fully aware of the new picture of man’s place in the universe revealed by modern science. The contemplation of this unprecedented human situation sometimes evoked his fears and forebodings.
In his The Idylls of the King through the myth of a dying society, the author expresses some of his fears for 19th-century England. In the poem the individual narratives are linked by a common theme: the destructive effect of sexual passion on an honorable society. The Round Table is brought down in ruins by the illicit love of Lancelot and Guenevere. Some of Tennyson's contemporaries regretted that he had lavished so much attention on the legendary past.
Maud and Other Poems almost certainly expresses some of the author's youthful anxieties as recollected in middle age. The hero furiously rejects the materialism and callousness of 19th-century society.
Quotations:
According to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Tennyson is the ninth most frequently quoted writer.
“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you. .. I could walk through my garden forever."
“Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
“Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'...”
“I am a part of all that I have met.”
“I will drink life to the lees.”
“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”
“A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.”
“Sometimes the heart sees what's invisible to the eye.”
“Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?”
“The words 'far, far away' had always a strange charm.”
“Come friends, it's not too late to seek a newer world.”
“The quiet sense of something lost”
“Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die”
“No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.”
“There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
“Sweet is true love that is given in vain, and sweet is death that takes away pain.”
Membership
Alfred Tennyson was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Personality
Tennyson was a craftsman who polished and revised his manuscripts extensively, to the point where his efforts at self-editing were described by his contemporary Robert Browning as "insane", symptomatic of "mental infirmity". Few poets have used such a variety of styles with such an exact understanding of metre. T. S. Eliot famously described Tennyson as "the saddest of all English poets", whose technical mastery of verse and language provided a "surface" to his poetry's "depths, to the abyss of sorrow". A passionate man with some peculiarities of nature, he was never particularly comfortable as a peer, and it is widely held that he took the peerage in order to secure a future for his son Hallam.
Physical Characteristics:
Queen Victoria described him in her diary as "very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair & a beard, oddly dressed, but there is no affectation about him."
Quotes from others about the person
Stephen Jay Gould: "Answers to questions about ethical meaning cannot come from science. Tennyson... knew that the "good life"... required their successful integration. Tennyson called these two sources knowledge and reverence, personified as mind and soul. And he spoke of their union...
"Let knowledge grow from more to more
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music, as before."
Aldous Huxley: "Tennyson knew his magician's business."
Connections
In 1836 Tennyson fell in love with Emily Sellwood, whom he met at the marriage of her sister to his brother George. Though Alfred proposed to Emily in 1837, the engagement was broken off three years later. The couple again resumed communication in 1849, finally getting married in the middle of June 1850. Three sons were born to them, out of which one died in infancy.
Their eldest son, Hallam, was named after his Cambridge friend Hallam. He became the 2nd Baron Tennyson and authored ‘Tennyson: a Memoir’. Their younger son Lionel was inflicted with ‘jungle fever’ on a visit to India and died on the way back home in 1886.
Until November 1853, the family lived mostly in London. Thereafter, they moved to the Isle of Wight, where he built a secluded house in Farringford. But in 1869, pestered by tourists, he was forced to move to Aldworth, in West Sussex. However, they continued to retain their house in Farringford.
Father:
George Clayton Tennyson
Mother:
Elizabeth Fytche
Spouse:
Emily Sarah Tennyson
Son:
Hon. Lionel Tennyson
Son:
Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson
Friend:
Arthur Hallam
References
Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Legacy
Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Legacy explores the critics' reaction to the work of the nineteenth-century English poet most closely associated with the Victorian era.
Tennyson
Peter Levi, a prolific poet and one of England's most well-respected scholars, brings his wide learning and poet's sensibility to an intelligent and appreciative examination of the life and work of one of the English language's most accomplished and enduring masters.
1994
Tennyson
Describes Tennyson's confused and unhappy early life and analyses the distinctive poetry which developed from his experiences