Life & Background
Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire in 1809, the fourth of twelve children of a clergyman embittered by being disinherited, and grew up in a household shadowed by drink, epilepsy, and mental illness — a family history he feared for himself. At Cambridge he joined the Apostles and formed the friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam that shaped his life; Hallam's sudden death in Vienna in 1833, at twenty-two, produced seventeen years of elegiac writing. A savage review of his 1832 volume drove him into a decade of silence. The 1842 Poems restored him, In Memoriam in 1850 made him famous, and in the same year he became Poet Laureate and finally married Emily Sellwood after a fourteen-year engagement. He was made a baron in 1884 and died in 1892.
In Memoriam A.H.H.
A sequence of 131 lyrics with a prologue and epilogue, written over seventeen years after Arthur Hallam's death and arranged to move across roughly three years, marked by three Christmases. It begins in raw grief — the dark house in the long unlovely street where the poet stands at the door at daybreak — and moves through doubt, consolation refused, and the slow reconstruction of belief. The famous central section confronts geology and evolutionary theory a decade before Darwin: a Nature red in tooth and claw that cares for the type but not the single life, and behind that the fear that even the type is expendable. The sequence ends with a marriage hymn and a hope that the dead man was a herald of a higher race to come.
The stanza — four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming abba — is Tennyson's own adaptation, and its enclosing rhyme keeps returning the reader to where the stanza began, which is grief's own motion. The poem's authority in its period came from refusing easy consolation: it stages the collision between religious hope and the new sciences and arrives at faith by will rather than by proof, which is why Victoria said she found comfort in it after Albert's death, and why later critics have read it as the century's central document of doubt. Ulysses, Tithonus, and The Lotos-Eaters show his other strength, the dramatic monologue of a mind at the end of its energies.
Why Tennyson Matters
Tennyson is the Victorian poet against whom the period is defined, and In Memoriam is the standard text for questions on faith, doubt, and the impact of geology and evolution on literature. His metrical range is the widest of any nineteenth-century English poet, and his public verse — the Laureate poems, The Charge of the Light Brigade — makes him a case study in the poet as national institution. The reaction against him by the modernists is equally examinable.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Poems, Chiefly Lyrical1830
- Poems1842
- The Princess1847
- In Memoriam A.H.H.1850
- Maud1855
- Idylls of the King1859–85
- Crossing the Bar1889