HELLO READERS,
This blog is based on thinking activity. Assigned by Megha ma'am (assi. Professor English department MKBU). In this blog I tried to explain whole life of a Alfred Tennyson as a Victorian Poet.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in full Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Freshwater, (born August 6, 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, England—died October 6, 1892, Aldworth, Surrey), English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884.
Early life and work :
Tennyson was the fourth of 12 children, born into an old Lincolnshire family, his father a rector. Alfred, with two of his brothers, Frederick and Charles, was sent in 1815 to Louth grammar school—where he was unhappy. He left in 1820, but, though home conditions were difficult, his father managed to give him a wide literary education. Alfred was precocious, and before his teens he had composed in the styles of Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, and John Milton. To his youth also belongs The Devil and the Lady (a collection of previously unpublished poems published posthumously in 1930), which shows an astonishing understanding of Elizabethan dramatic verse. Lord Byron was a dominant influence on the young Tennyson.
At the lonely rectory in Somersby the children were thrown upon their own resources. All writers on Tennyson emphasize the influence of the Lincolnshire countryside on his poetry: the plain, the sea about his home, “the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea,” and “the waste enormous marsh.”
In 1824 the health of Tennyson’s father began to break down, and he took refuge in drink. Alfred, though depressed by unhappiness at home, continued to write, collaborating with Frederick and Charles in Poems by Two Brothers (1826; dated 1827). His contributions (more than half the volume) are mostly in fashionable styles of the day.
In 1827 Alfred and Charles joined Frederick at Trinity College, Cambridge. There Alfred made friends with Arthur Hallam, the gifted son of the historian Henry Hallam. This was the deepest friendship of Tennyson’s life. The friends became members of the Apostles, an exclusive undergraduate club of earnest intellectual interests. Tennyson’s reputation as a poet increased at Cambridge. In 1829 he won the chancellor’s gold medal with a poem called Timbuctoo. In 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical was published; and in the same year Tennyson, Hallam, and other Apostles went to Spain to help in the unsuccessful revolution against Ferdinand VII. In the meantime, Hallam had become attached to Tennyson’s sister Emily but was forbidden by her father to correspond with her for a year.
In 1831 Tennyson’s father died. Alfred’s misery was increased by his grandfather’s discovery of his father’s debts. He left Cambridge without taking a degree, and his grandfather made financial arrangements for the family. In the same year, Hallam published a eulogistic article on Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in The Englishman’s Magazine. He went to Somersby in 1832 as the accepted suitor of Emily.
In 1832 Tennyson published another volume of his poems (dated 1833), including “The Lotos-Eaters,” “The Palace of Art,” and “The Lady of Shalott.” Among them was a satirical epigram on the critic Christopher North (pseudonym of the Scottish writer John Wilson), who had attacked Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in Blackwood’s Magazine. Tennyson’s sally prompted a scathing attack on his new volume in the Quarterly Review. The attacks distressed Tennyson, but he continued to revise his old poems and compose new ones.
In 1833 Hallam’s engagement was recognized by his family, but while on a visit to Vienna in September he died suddenly. The shock to Tennyson was severe. It came at a depressing time; three of his brothers, Edward, Charles, and Septimus, were suffering from mental illness, and the bad reception of his own work added to the gloom. Yet it was in this period that he wrote some of his most characteristic work: “The Two Voices” (of which the original title, significantly, was “Thoughts of a Suicide”), “Ulysses,” “St. Simeon Stylites,” and, probably, the first draft of “Morte d’Arthur.” To this period also belong some of the poems that became constituent parts of In Memoriam, celebrating Hallam’s death, and lyrics later worked into Maud.
In May 1836 his brother Charles married Louisa Sellwood of Horncastle, and at the wedding Alfred fell in love with her sister Emily. For some years the lovers corresponded, but Emily’s father disapproved of Tennyson because of his bohemianism, addiction to port and tobacco, and liberal religious views; and in 1840 he forbade the correspondence. Meanwhile the Tennysons had left Somersby and were living a rather wandering life nearer London. It was in this period that Tennyson made friends with many famous men, including the politician William Ewart Gladstone, the historian Thomas Carlyle, and the poet Walter Savage Landor.
Education and first publication :
Tennyson was a student of King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth from 1816 to 1820. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he joined a secret society called the Cambridge Apostles. A portrait of Tennyson by George Frederic Watts is in Trinity's collection.
At Cambridge, Tennyson met Arthur Hallam and William Henry Brookfield, who became his closest friends. His first publication was a collection of "his boyish rhymes and those of his elder brother Charles" entitled Poems by Two Brothers, published in 1827.
Tennyson's best-known poems/Major Works :
The Charge of the Light Brigade :
Perhaps Tennyson's most famous poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" tells the historical story of the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War, where the British Light Brigade suffered heavy casualties.The poem begins:Half a league, half a league,
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
In Memoriam :
Written as a eulogy of sorts for his great friend Arthur Hallam, this moving poem has become a staple of memorial services. The famous line "Nature, red in tooth and claw," makes its first appearance in this poem, which begins:
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove
A Farewell :
Many of Tennyson's works are focused on death; in this poem, he ponders how everyone dies, but nature will continue after we're gone.
Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be
For ever and for ever
Break, Break, Break :
This is another Tennyson poem where the narrator is struggling to express his grief about a lost friend. The waves break relentlessly on the beach, reminding the narrator that time moves on.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
Crossing the Bar :
This 1889 poem uses the analogy of the sea and the sand to represent death. It's said that Tennyson requested this poem be included as the final entry in any collections of his work after his death.
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal :
This Tennyson sonnet is so lyrical that many songwriters have tried to put it to music. It ponders, through the use of natural metaphors (flowers, stars, fireflies) what it means to remember someone.
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.
The Lady of Shalott :
Based on an Arthurian legend, this poem tells the story of a lady who is under a mysterious curse. Here's an excerpt:
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls :
This rhyming, lyrical poem is a somber reflection on how one is remembered. After hearing a bugle call echo around a valley, the narrator considers the "echoes" that people leave behind.
The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Ulysses :
Tennyson's interpretation of the mythological Greek king finds him wanting to return to traveling, even after many years away from home. This poem contains the famous and oft-quoted line "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Here is the opening to Tennyson's "Ulysses."
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race
Legacy of Tennyson :
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was the leading poet of the Victorian Age in England and by the mid-19th century had come to occupy a position similar to that of Alexander Pope in the 18th. Tennyson was a consummate poetic artist, consolidating and refining the traditions bequeathed to him by his predecessors in the Romantic movement—especially Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. His poetry is remarkable for its metrical variety, rich descriptive imagery, and exquisite verbal melodies. But Tennyson was also regarded as the preeminent spokesman for the educated middle-class Englishman, in moral and religious outlook and in political and social consciousness no less than in matters of taste and sentiment. His poetry dealt often with the doubts and difficulties of an age in which established Christian faith and traditional assumptions about man’s nature and destiny were increasingly called into question by science and modern progress. His poetry dealt with these misgivings, moreover, as the intimate personal problems of a sensitive and troubled individual inclined to melancholy. Yet through his poetic mastery—the spaciousness and nobility of his best verse, its classical aptness of phrase, its distinctive harmony—he conveyed to sympathetic readers a feeling of implicit reassurance, even serenity. Tennyson may be seen as the first great English poet to be fully aware of the new picture of man’s place in the universe revealed by modern science. While the contemplation of this unprecedented human situation sometimes evoked his fears and forebodings, it also gave him a larger imaginative range than most of the poets of his time and added a greater depth and resonance to his art.
Tennyson’s ascendancy among Victorian poets began to be questioned even during his lifetime, however, when Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne were serious rivals. And 20th-century criticism, influenced by the rise of a new school of poetry headed by T.S. Eliot (though Eliot himself was an admirer of Tennyson), proposed some drastic devaluations of his work. Undoubtedly, much in Tennyson that appealed to his contemporaries has ceased to appeal to many readers today. He can be mawkish and banal, pompous and orotund, offering little more than the mellifluous versifying of shallow or confused thoughts. The rediscovery of such earlier poets as John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins (a poet of Tennyson’s own time who was then unknown to the public), together with the widespread acceptance of Eliot and W.B. Yeats as the leading modern poets, opened the ears of readers to a very different, and perhaps more varied, poetic music. A more balanced estimate of Tennyson has begun to prevail, however, with the recognition of the enduring greatness of “Ulysses,” the unique poignancy of Tennyson’s best lyric poems, and, above all, the stature of In Memoriam as the great representative poem of the Victorian Age. It is now also recognized that the realistic and comic aspects of Tennyson’s work are more important than they were thought to be during the period of the reaction against him. Finally, the perception of the poet’s awed sense of the mystery of life, which lies at the heart of his greatness, as in “Crossing the Bar” or “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” unites his admirers in this century with those in the last. Though less of Tennyson’s work may survive than appeared likely during his Victorian heyday, what does remain—and it is by no means small in quantity—seems likely to be imperishable.
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