TENNYSON, ALFRED. - English poet, b. at Somersby on 6 Aug. 1809, d. in London on 6 Oct. 1892. He was the most distinguished and in every respect the most representative of the Victorian poets. Endowed with exceptional taste and ear, he was a perfect craftsman of verse, a most musical bard trained in the school of Virgil.
He nevertheless soon fell into the error of binding himself too closely to the myths of his own age, of which he was the official poet, compelling himself to adapt his idyllic muse to civil events and social questions. He nevertheless lived apart from public life and never departed from his aims of formal rigor. In poems such as The lotus eaters (1833) and Ulysses (1842), he recalled the themes and motifs of classical epic poetry in elegiac structures and cadences; and in the Fylls of the king, published at various times between 1842 and 1885 (the central nucleus appeared in 1859), he similarly resumed the themes of the Arthurian epic, drawing them from Malory’s Morte d'Arthur. In the elegies of In memoriam A. H. H., which the poet composed slowly between 1833, the year of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, to whom they are dedicated, and 1850, the year in which the collection was published, a genuine and moving inspiration is characteristically mingled with a nebulous and agnostic speculation on life and the afterlife.