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II The English Poetry of Victorian Age
1. Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
 Life
Alfred Tennyson was born into the family of a clergyman
in Sommersby, England on August 6, 1809, twenty years after the start of the
French Revolution and
toward the end of the
Napoleonic Wars. In
childhood, he was mainly educated at home by his father. The young Alfred
modeled himself on Byron and demonstrated an early flair for poetry,
composing a full-length verse drama at the age of fourteen. In 1827, when he
was eighteen, he and his brother Charles published an anonymous collection
entitled Poems by Two Brothers, receiving a few vague complimentary reviews.
The same year, he entered the Trinity College of Cambridge, where he
encountered and befriended with his college-mate
Arthur Henry Hallam. The
two toured Europe together while they were still undergraduates and Hallam
later became engaged to the poet’s sister Emily. In 1830, Tennyson published
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Another two volumes of poetry, The Lady of Shallot
and The Lotos-Eaters (1832), published one year after he left Cambridge
because of his father’s death in 1831, showed obvious influence of Keats and
Spencer and met with rather severe and hostile criticism from conventional
critics. In 1833, Tennyson received the most devastating blow in his entire
life: his dearest friend Hallam died of fever in Italy. His tremendous grief
at the news permeated much of Tennyson’s later poetry, including the great
elegy In Memoriam. For ten years between 1832 and 1842, determining to gain
his reputation as a poet, Tennyson kept silence to perfect his skill on
poetry. In 1842, he republished the two 1832 volumes of poems, including
“Ulysses”, “Tithonus”, and other famous short lyrics about death of
Coleridge, Shelly, Byron, and indeed all of the great Romantic poets except
Wordsworth, and finally established himself as a popular poet. In 1847, The
Princess was brought to the public. In 1850, he was appointed as the Poet
Laureate in succession of Wordsworth. With this title he became the most
popular poet in Victorian England and could finally afford to marry Emily
Sellwood, whom he had been in love with since 1836.
Tennyson continued to write and to gain
popularity. His later works of included the monodrama, Maud (1855), the
twelve-volume long poem, The Idylls of the King (1859-1885), and some short
lyrics, “Merlin and the Gleam” and “Crossing the Bar”(1889). In Maud, a
speaker tells his story in a sequence of short lyrics in varying meters;
Tennyson described the work as an experimental “monodrama.” In 1884, he was
made a baron and thus has been called Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He dedicated
most of the last fifteen years of his life to writing a series of
full-length dramas in blank verse, which, however, failed to excite any
particular interest. He died in 1892 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
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