Tennyson, Alfred

TENNYSON, ALFRED. - English poet, b. at Somersby on 6 Aug. 1809, d. in London on 6 Oct. 1892. He was the most conspicuous and in every sense the most representative of the Victorian poets. Endowed with an exceptional taste and ear, he was a perfect craftsman of verse, a most musical bard educated 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, forcing himself to adapt his idyllic muse to civil events and social questions. He lived, however, apart from public life and never fell short of his own aims of formal rigor. In compositions such as The lotus eaters (1833) and Ulysses (1842) he evoked the themes and motifs of classical epic poetry in elegiac structures and cadences, and in the Fylls of the king, published in various installments between 1842 and 1885 (the central core appeared in 1859), he took up in similar ways 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 pathetic inspiration is characteristically mingled with a nebulous and agnostic speculation on life and the afterlife.

Augusto Guid.