Alfred Tennyson: Forty-Two Years as the Voice of an Empire
When *Idylls of the King* went on sale, 40,000 copies moved immediately. By then Alfred Tennyson was a celebrity on roughly the scale of Queen Victoria and Gladstone — he eventually had to buy a second house to get away from tourists — and phrases he wrote had detached themselves from their poems and entered the language: "Nature, red in tooth and claw," "'Tis better to have loved and lost," "Theirs not to reason why." He held the laureateship from 1850 to 1892, the longest tenure anyone has managed. His last recorded words were a complaint about the newspapers: "Oh that press will have me now!"
Somersby, and a Disinherited Father
He was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby in Lincolnshire, the fourth of twelve children of an Anglican clergyman. The central fact of the household was a grievance: George Clayton Tennyson had been passed over as heir in favour of his younger brother and pushed into the church instead. The family carried mental illness, addiction and financial instability, and the son who emerged from it wrote, for six decades, about loss.
He went to King Edward VI Grammar School at Louth from 1816 to 1820, and to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827. The apprenticeship had started early: *Poems by Two Brothers* appeared the same year, and in 1829 he took the Chancellor's Gold Medal for "Timbuctoo."
Cambridge, and Arthur Hallam
At Trinity he was elected to the Apostles, the university's semi-secret discussion society, and there he met Arthur Henry Hallam, himself a poet. The friendship was the formative relationship of his life. *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical* followed in 1830.
In 1833 Hallam died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna. Tennyson was twenty-four. The loss did not merely wound him; it became his permanent subject, and it produced, seventeen years later, the poem on which his reputation still principally rests. Few writers have been so thoroughly organised around a single bereavement, and fewer still have made something of that scale out of it.
The Ten Years' Silence
The timing was cruel. His 1832 *Poems* had been savaged — John Wilson Croker's review included veiled insinuations about the lack of masculinity of both the poems and the poet — and Hallam's death arrived on top of it. Tennyson withdrew from publication for roughly a decade. He did not stop writing; he stopped exposing the work. The privately accumulated material of those years is what he came back with.
1842, and the Laureateship
The two-volume *Poems* of 1842 contained "Ulysses," "Locksley Hall" and "Break, Break, Break," and it settled the argument. He was, from that point, the foremost poet of his generation.
Then 1850 delivered everything at once. He published *In Memoriam A.H.H.*, the long sequence of elegies for Hallam written across seventeen years; he married Emily Sellwood, which steadied a life that had badly needed steadying; and, on William Wordsworth's death, he was appointed Poet Laureate. He would hold the post for forty-two years. It is a remarkable convergence — the private grief finally discharged in public, the domestic settlement, and the official crown of English letters, all inside twelve months.
Not everything went well. An investment in a Dr Allen's ecclesiastical wood-carving venture destroyed a large part of his money and pitched him into serious depression — the kind of Victorian misfortune that reads as farce until you notice what it cost him.
Fame on the Scale of a Monarch
The later books came steadily: *The Princess* (1847), *Maud and Other Poems* (1855), which carried "The Charge of the Light Brigade," *Idylls of the King* across 1859 to 1885, and *Enoch Arden* (1864). His command of image and rhythm made him the decisive influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
He rented Farringford House on the Isle of Wight in 1853 and bought it in 1856, then acquired Aldworth in West Sussex in 1869 specifically to escape sightseers, keeping Farringford for winters. He twice refused a baronetcy from Disraeli, in 1865 and 1868, before accepting a peerage in 1883 at Gladstone's urging; Victoria created him Baron Tennyson in 1884. He was the first poet ever raised to the peerage for literary achievement alone. He went on writing into his eighties.
Why Alfred Is Called a Genius
The claim is technical, and unusually narrow for a writer of his stature. Tennyson's gift was for sound — the Poetry Foundation's assessment is that his lyric ear for cadence is probably unequalled in the history of English poetry, which is an enormous statement made carefully. He composed by walking, assembling phrases and single lines aloud, letting rhythm and vowel lead ahead of argument. The corresponding skill is his use of landscape and object to carry emotional states without naming them, the method of "Mariana." Edmund Gosse's verdict was that his greatness "has lain in the various perfections of his writing," and that he wrote "with more constant, unwearied, and unwearying excellence than any of his contemporaries." Modern scholarship still places him among the half-dozen great poets in English.
The counter-case is blunt. W. H. Auden called him the stupidest of English poets and added the deadly qualification: "There was little about melancholia he didn't know; there was little else that he did." T. S. Eliot named him "the saddest of all English poets." Both point at the same limit — an incomparable instrument in the service of a narrow emotional range. Critics have long noted that his characterisation and narrative construction are weak, and that the long works turn sentimental; the genius is in the lyric, not the epic. His reputation collapsed with modernism, largely because he had become the symbol of his age and the age was being repudiated. What survives the objection is the ear.
Westminster Abbey
He died at Aldworth on 6 October 1892, aged 83, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Victorian consensus that made him a peer also made him, for a generation after his death, unreadable — too official, too much the emblem of a period that the twentieth century wanted no part of. That verdict has been substantially revised. What has never needed revision is the strange durability of the lines themselves: a poet whose intellectual reputation has swung violently for a century and a half, and whose phrasing still turns up, unattributed, in the ordinary speech of people who have never read a word of him.
Achievements
- Chancellor's Gold Medal
- Notable work: The Charge of the Light Brigade
- Notable work: The Lady of Shalott
- Notable work: Idylls of the King
- Notable work: The Princess
