I did notice a change, a move towards a more narrative style as I continued reading, but much of the time the messages remained morbid. My selection was taken from Tennyson's entire oeuvre there were 96, including a long 150-page poem at the end, so it covered most of his moods. Perhaps these were his early poems, I wondered.
TENNYSON POETRY COLLECTION FULL
Poem after poem seemed to be about women - beautiful, passive women - and full of the poet's melancholy, and feelings of aching desolation. So in a way I went into reading him "blind". Like many, perhaps, I had an image in my mind of a brooding, bearded patriarch:Īnd a hazy memory of poems read at school such as "Locksley Hall", but no lines actually sprang to mind. he died in 1892 at the age of 83 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.ĭo I like Tennyson? I wasn't sure. Tennyson continued to write poetry throughout his life and in the 1870s also wrote a number of plays. He was the first Englishman to be granted such a high rank solely for literary distinction. In 1884, as a great favourite of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, he was raised to the peerage and was thereafter known as Baron Tennyson of Aldworth. They had two children, Hallam born in 1852 and Lionel, two years later. In 1850, following William Wordsworth, Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate and married his childhood friend, Emily Sellwood. In 1833, Tennyson's best friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to his sister, died, inspiring some of his best work including In Memoriam, Ulysses and the Passing of Arthur. His second book, Poems Chiefly Lyrical was published in 1830.
In 1816 Tennyson was sent to Louth Grammar School, which he disliked so intensely that from 1820 he was educated at home until at the age of 18 he joined his two brothers at Trinity College, Cambridge and with his brother Charles published his first book, Poems by Two Brothers the same year. Alfred Tennyson, invariably known as Alfred Lord Tennyson on all his books, was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the fourth of the twelve children of George Tennyson, clergyman, and his wife, Elizabeth.
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