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Although not as universally loved by his contemporaries as is sometimes assumed, Alfred Tennyson was indeed the object of adulation and near-veneration. In later decades, especially the 1920s, time's corrective pendulum was particularly cruel to his reputation, as he was perceived as the embodiment of every negative connotation that we have packed into the term "Victorian." With the further passing of time, a more balanced perspective has allowed us to appreciate the many sides to Tennyson's relationship with his times, and especially to appreciate his astonishing poetic gift, whose force and beauty are undiminished for all times.
Alfred Tennyson, the fourth child (of twelve) and fourth son of the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson and Elizabeth (Fytche) Tennyson, was born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, on August 6, 1809. His father was a man of some culture and literary taste, who recognized his son's poetic abilities when Alfred was still in his early teens. Tennyson wrote The Devil and the Lady, a full-length verse drama modeled on the plays of his Shakespeare and his contemporaries, when he was fourteen. But the atmosphere in which Tennyson was raised was one of bitterness and relative poverty, since his father had been all but disinherited in favor of his younger brother. In 1815, Alfred went to live with his maternal grandmother at Louth, where he attended the local grammar school with his older brothers Frederick and Charles. He hated the school, with a hatred that never left him, and that barely diminished in intensity, for the rest of his long life. In 1820, he was called home, to be privately educated by his father, but over the next several years the Reverend Tennyson underwent a serious decline, accelerated by disappointment and drink, in both his physical and his mental health.
In November 1827, Alfred found relief from the stresses of his home situation when he was admitted to Cambridge University. Although only eighteen years of age, Tennyson was already a published poet, for in April 1827 he had participated in the anonymous publication of a volume called Poems by Two Brothers. More than half the poems were by Alfred and most of the others by Charles, but the volume was actually by three brothers, since it also contained three or four poems by Frederick. The book received a couple of brief, vaguely complimentary notices, but seems otherwise, unsurprisingly, to have made no impression. Tennyson never reprinted any of these immature works. At Cambridge, in the spring of 1829, he made a friendship which, though tragically brief, would have a profound affect on his life, when he met fellow undergraduate Arthur Henry Hallam. This meeting came at a particularly difficult time in Tennyson's life. In the wake of a violent quarrel that had led his father to threaten to kill Frederick, his long-suffering mother determined to suffer no longer, and separated from her husband. The family would be briefly reunited the following year, months before Rev. Tennyson's death in March 1831.
The friendship of Hallam, whose peers and elders predicted for him a future of unlimited glories, and who greatly admired Tennyson's work, meant everything to the lonely and depressed young poet, who, in addition to his family troubles, experienced religious doubts and feared for his sanity. Even after Tennyson left Cambridge in 1831, without a degree, the two young men remained close. They toured parts of Europe together in 1830 and 1832, and Hallam became engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily. Meanwhile, in 1830, Tennyson published a volume entitled Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, which was received relatively gently and sold moderately well. This was followed in 1833, when he was still in his early twenties, by one called simply Poems.
In that same year of 1833, Tennyson suffered two overwhelming blows. In April, his new collection--which did contain some trivial and even inane verses, but also included such early masterworks as "Mariana" and "The Lotos-Eaters"--was subjected to a scathing evaluation in the Quarterly Review, killing the book's sales and making Tennyson intensely sensitive to reviews for the rest of his life. On September 15, there occurred an event infinitely more devastating to him, when Arthur Henry Hallam, in the midst of a European tour with his father, died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage in Vienna. As Christopher Ricks has said of Tennyson, "The death of Hallam struck deeply not because he had supposed life to be good, but because he had long known that it was no such thing." The shock and loss of Hallam's death plunged Tennyson into a melancholy, at times verging on the suicidal, that would last for years, and whose effects would never wholly leave him.
Tennyson continued to write. In fact, within weeks of Hallam's death, he wrote the first few of the more than one hundred poems, all in tetrameter quatrains rhyming abba, that would ultimately form the sequence In Memoriam. In the spring of the following year came the lyric "Break, Break, Break," which was also inspired by the loss of Hallam. But, although he wrote copiously, and extensively revised the best pieces from the lambasted 1833 volume, over nearly a decade he published only two poems, both in 1837. In 1836, at the wedding of his brother Charles, Tennyson met Emily Sellwood, the bride's sister, and the two were immediately drawn to one another. They became engaged in 1838, but Tennyson's poverty and need to help support his mother and siblings made the prospect of marriage a remote one at best. Matters were not helped when the Tennysons invested in 1840 (and ultimately lost) what little they had in "Pyroglyphs," a plan for a mechanical wood-working device. Also in 1840, Emily's family broke off the engagement and forbade the couple to see one another. Tennyson's emotional difficulties, aggravated by financial ruin and increasing hypochondria, led him in 1843 to voluntarily commit himself to an institution in which he underwent the water cure, a then-popular treatment not unlike contemporary natural-healing remedies, which involved avoidance of smoking, drinking, and medication, and the drinking of copious amounts of water to cleanse the system.
In the midst of what was arguably the lowest point in what had so far been a generally wretched existence, Tennyson found some consolation in the great success of his Poems (1842) in two volumes. As is often the case in such matters, timing played a part in that success. Except for William Wordsworth, who was near the end of his life and career, all the great Romantic poets were dead, and no successors of comparable quality had yet emerged. Tennyson was able to fill this void so thoroughly, not merely because it existed, but because he had produced work of sufficient artistry and power to establish himself as a major poet. "Ulysses," one of the finest poems in this collection, immediately became one of Tennyson's most popular. His absolute mastery of rhythm and sonorous phrasing (in which qualities he is virtually unmatched) were displayed everywhere in its ringing lines, and its thematic emphasis on idealism and eternal striving were perfectly attuned to the sentiments of what was then beginning to take shape as the Victorian age. An interesting counterpoint may be drawn, as Tennyson himself intended, between "Ulysses" and its companion piece "Tithonus," which was originally written in 1833 and extensively revised in 1859; this monologue, which outdoes even "Ulysses" in the sheer beauty of its writing, uses another figure of Greek mythology to draw an opposite conclusion, that tragic consequences await those who fail to observe the limits of human questing.
Tennyson's poetic success and growing fame reaped practical benefits as well. In 1845, certain of his friends, including the father of Arthur Henry Hallam, persuaded Sir Robert Peel to award the poet a Civil List pension of £200 per year, thus easing the crushing financial strain that had marked Tennyson's entire life. His next work was The Princess (1847), a long poem that raises social and political issues, including the education of women, but fails to deal satisfactorily with them (with its subtitle A Medley, it also evades the structural and thematic responsibilities of the long poem); but, whatever its weaknesses, it is justly celebrated for the loveliness and mastery of the interspersed songs in both its original and revised versions, among them "Tears, Idle Tears" and "The splendor falls on castle walls."
The year 1850 proved to be the turning point of Tennyson's life. On June 1, In Memoriam was published anonymously, although it was widely known to be by Tennyson, and was, with both reviewers and the reading public, an instant triumph. On June 13, Tennyson married Emily Sellwood, with whom he had maintained a correspondence ("The peace of God came into my life when I wedded her," he told one of his sons many years later). On November 5, based largely on the strength of the admiration of her husband Prince Albert for In Memoriam, Queen Victoria offered Tennyson the post of poet laureate, which had been vacant since the death of Wordsworth in April and which, after a bit of characteristic ambivalence, he accepted.
In Memoriam takes its protagonist from shock, anguish, and despair over the death of his beloved friend, through attempts to affirm an optimistic view of human possibility ("So runs my dream: but what am I?/An infant crying in the night:/An infant crying for the light:/And with no language but a cry"), to a resolution in which, pursuant to the evolutionary theories that were taking hold of the imagination of the age, he comes to see his friend as the prototype of a refined human nature and feels that that friend's qualities, once having been, can never wholly disappear. It is a work that spoke to the Victorian age in all of its contrasts and complexities, its assertions and its anxieties ("There lives more faith in honest doubt,/Believe me, than in half the creeds"), and in the universality of its concerns, it speaks just as powerfully to our own or to any other time.
Despite the startling transformations of his annus mirabilis, Tennyson did not immediately settle into a life of unalloyed security and success. On Easter Sunday 1851, his first son was stillborn, strangled by the umbilical cord, and Emily lay near death for several days afterward before beginning to recover. They would have two more sons--Hallam, born in 1852, and Lionel, born in 1854; the greatest grief of Tennyson's life would come when Lionel died of a fever on a return voyage from India in 1886, leaving a wife and several children. An Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852), Tennyson's first publication since his appointment as poet laureate, received a mixed press, partly because of its metrical experimentation.
Maud (1855), his next major work, provoked even more hostile responses from reviewers, one of whom said that its title contained too many vowels and that the removal of either one would be equally satisfactory. The poem is narrated in a series of lyrics by its protagonist, a highly sensitive young man whose father has committed suicide after the failure of a financial speculation. He loves Maud, the daughter of the man responsible for his father's ruin, but her family wants to marry her off to a young aristocrat. After a violent culmination, the narrator, in the poem's most controversial episode, achieves a catharsis by enlisting to fight in the Crimean War. It was a work close to Tennyson's heart, and Robert Browning, his only peer among his contemporaries, endeared himself to Tennyson by reading Maud four times and declaring it a great poem. The qualities that alienated the reviewers and that appealed to Browning--the subjective viewpoint, the oblique and fragmentary approach to narrative, the exploration of morbid self-consciousness--mark it as one of Tennyson's most advanced productions, and help to give it a high standing among contemporary critics of his work.
Maud had sold well, even in the face of negative reviews. Tennyson's next work, the first four Idylls of the King (1859) was a great success with both readers and reviewers. It would take Tennyson another fifteen years to complete all twelve of the blank-verse narratives that comprised his treatment of the legendary King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The completed work remained popular with the public and with the royal family--after rejecting the offer several times, Tennyson was persuaded to accept a baronetcy in 1883, thus becoming Alfred, Lord Tennyson--but it was received much more coolly by his fellow poets and by subsequent critics, many of whom have felt that narrative power (never one of Tennyson's chief strengths) is sacrificed for descriptiveness, and have found the work's sonorities rhetorical, its psychology unpersuasive, and its idealism redolent of Victorian priggishness and complacency. More recent critics of Tennyson have taken a somewhat more positive view, admitting the structural and other weaknesses, but engaged nonetheless by Tennyson's attempt to treat of the failure of nobility as it is embodied in imperfect human nature.
Although Tennyson never completely abandoned the lyric mode, his interest in narrative continued to predominate, and the last fifteen years of his life were largely given over to writing a series of full-length dramas in blank verse, works which failed to excite any particular interest, then or now. The placidity of his last years, in the midst of wealth and enormous fame, was shattered by Lionel's death and by his own worsening health. He suffered a severe attack of rheumatic gout in 1888 and a serious case of influenza in 1890, the same year in which Thomas Edison recorded a wax cylinder of Tennyson reading the opening lines of "The Charge of the Light Brigade," thus preserving for us the voice of a man who was born in 1809. A semi-invalid and near recluse, Tennyson died of heart failure on October 6, 1892.
The years of disillusionment that followed the First World War saw a revulsion against the older generation and all things associated with it. "The old order changeth, yielding place to new," as Tennyson has the dying Arthur say at the end of the Idylls, "And God fulfills himself in many ways/Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Tennyson, as one of the most visible exemplars of the Victorian age and all that it was presumed to stand for, came in for particular scorn and dismissal. The urge to strike at the father is an understandable and perhaps even necessary one; nonetheless, it is incomprehensible that his detractors could have been deaf to the incomparable music of Tennyson's best work, or that anyone at any time could fail for any reason to recognize him for what he is, one of the truly great figures in the history of English poetry.
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