Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, (1809-92). British poet. The son of a Lincolnshire rector, he began writing as a child. At Cambridge University he met Arthur Hallam, whose death is commemorated in In Memoriam (1850), a long poem sequence that earned Tennyson the position of Poet Laureate. Earlier volumes of poetry contained ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832), ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ (1832), and Morte d’Arthur (1842). From 1853 Tennyson lived on the Isle of Wight; his later works include Maud (1855) and the Arthurian poems in Idylls of the King (1859). From 1874 he experimented unsuccessfully with poetic drama. He was raised to the peerage in 1884.

“In youth, he looked like a gypsy; in an age like a dirty old monk; he had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also, undoubtedly, the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did. W. H. Auden, introduction to A Select/ 6n from the Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson’”