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Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1809–1892)

Perhaps the most important and certainly the most popular of the Victorian poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson demonstrated his talents at an early age; he published his first volume in 1827. Encouraged to devote his life to poetry by a group of undergraduates at Cambridge University known as the “Apostles,” Tennyson was particularly close to Arthur Hallam, whose sudden death in 1833 inspired the long elegy In Memoriam (1850). With that poem he achieved lasting fame and recognition; he was appointed Poet Laureate the year of its publication, succeeding Wordsworth. Despite the great popularity of his “journalistic” poems—“The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) is perhaps the best known—Tennyson's great theme was the past, both personal (In the Valley of Cauteretz, 1864) and national (Idylls of the King, 1869). Tennyson was made a baron in 1884; when he died, eight years later, he was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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