The name Alfred, Lord Tennyson is synonymous with not only Victorian literature, but the spirit of that age. In his poetry, Tennyson exemplified the morals and preoccupations of Victorian England. His was a society simultaneously buoyed by a sense of human progress—most of all in science and industry—and yet apprehensive of the spiritual, moral, and material effects of that unprecedented advancement. Tennyson’s artistic prowess transcended his temporal circumstances, however: he is remembered equally for the sublimity of his verse, the rhythmic and visual power of which is nearly unrivaled in English literature.

Tennyson achieved a degree of celebrity and success almost unfathomable for the modern poet. He was often called one of the world’s three most famous people, alongside Queen Victoria and William Gladstone, and, as one scholar put it, his works “occupied a significant space on the bookshelves of almost every family of readers in England and the United States.” The work which first propelled him to such heights, and which is often considered Tennyson’s masterpiece, was the long poem In Memoriam A.H.H., published in 1850. Itself a series of 133 interconnected, four-line compositions of iambic tetrameter, each written with an enclosed (ABBA) rhyme scheme, In Memoriam was Tennyson’s elegiac response to the death of his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, in 1833. Tennyson wrote the constituent sections of In Memoriam over the following 17 years, initially without the intention of combining them into a single poem. The end result, however, became one of the Victorian period’s defining works of literature.

The nineteenth century saw the advent of modern geology, with which scientists proved that the earth was in fact much older than recorded in the Bible; so too arrived Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the widespread understanding that thousands of species had come and gone over thousands of years. All this threw English society, previously secure in a clear religious outlook, into a state of uncertainty over the truth and interpretation of Christian teachings, including those that asserted the immortality of the soul. In Memoriam captured this profound, newfound doubt, especially as it manifested itself in novel complexities and difficulties in the process of mourning. Such uncertainty is paralleled in the ambiguity of the poem’s structure—is it a single work or a series of discrete pieces?—and its internal emotional vicissitudes. Commenting on the poem in the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot wrote that In Memoriam is singular not “because of the quality of its faith but because of the quality of its doubt.” Nevertheless, Tennyson’s verse asserts a deep sense that there is something “behind the veil, behind the veil”; as one critic put it, In Memoriam “[contemplates] an apparently pitiless universe” while still “[acknowledging] the reality of religious experience.”

In Memoriam is not merely of historical interest, however. Even today, when the urgency of Victorian anxieties has faded, the poem remains affecting in its approach to universal themes. Tennyson’s masterpiece, “a dark meditation,” in the words of poet Jay Parini, “on love and loss, life and death,” gives voice to the paradoxes of grief. In Memoriam expresses simultaneous, competing urges: to move on and yet to cling to sorrow; to find faith and in it closure, and yet to resist the finality that brings grief to an end. This intense psychological introspection is, as one scholar describes it, the poem’s “understated but heroic moral purpose.”

Tennyson had been an assiduous student of poetry from an early age, and the influence of his literary forebears shines through in his own work. The ancients loomed large: Eliot called him a “minor Virgil”; of Homer, Tennyson wrote that to translate his epics is “the work of a lifetime: and when done, the benefit of it rests with the translator.” Classical myth is the subject of a number of Tennyson’s most lauded poems, like “Ulysses,” “Tiresias,” and “Tithonus.” Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Shelley exerted at least an equally important influence on Tennyson’s poetic focus and development. In his estimation, Burns was “immortal,” and Keats, who died when Tennyson was 11, “would have been the first of us all” had he lived. Byron, too, was a particularly important model.

From the Romantics, Tennyson inherited a literary absorption with nature, and the natural world remained a principal muse throughout his life. The rural Lincolnshire of his childhood, the striking vistas of the Pyrenees, the Isle of Wight’s snowy cliffs, the dappled groves of England’s New Forest—all express themselves in his poetry, in which natural landscapes evoke intense emotion. As John Stuart Mill wrote in 1835, Tennyson possessed the “power of creating scenery, in keeping with some state of human feeling so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon the state of feeling itself, with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality.” Examples abound throughout In Memoriam (“couch’d at ease / The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees / Laid their dark arms about the field”), but Tennyson demonstrates this talent even at his most economical, in short poems like “Break, Break, Break” and “The Eagle.”

Tennyson’s landscapes often call up a pervasive melancholy; this feeling, in concert with a sense of isolation, is perhaps the trademark emotional quality of the poet’s work. Indeed, W.H. Auden disparagingly remarked that “there was little about melancholia [Tennyson] didn’t know; there was little else that he did.” He often created lonely, longing female characters to achieve this effect, in poems like “Mariana” and “The Lady of Shalott,” and he employs the language of widowhood to describe himself throughout In Memoriam.

The poet and scholar Michael Schmidt commented that Tennyson’s politics and religion were “rooted in memory of the past and fear of the future.” Such a sentiment marks his poetry, as well, which was ever concerned with tradition and the historical and mythological past, and expressed consternation at the direction of contemporary society. Nowhere is all of this more evident than the Idylls of the King, his epic, 12-poem cycle treating Arthurian legend and the collapse of the Round Table. It is, in the words of one scholar, a “vision of civilization’s rise and fall,” colored by Victorian morality and a “despairing sense of the cycles of historical change.” King Arthur, in the final book of the Idylls, rues that all his realm “Reels back into the beast, and is no more.” Tennyson delivered more direct social critique in poems like “Locksley Hall,” which decried the avarice of England’s nouveau-riche (an attitude informed by personal enmity for his own uncle). Yet Tennyson’s preoccupation with the bygone was not merely a response to his apprehension at the future. From his earliest days he was captivated by, as he put it, “a passion for the past”—“the words ‘far, far away’ had always a strange charm.”

As a result of both his extraordinary fame and his association with Victorian mores, Tennyson’s poetry suffered a nosedive in reputation shortly after his death. Modernist leaders like Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and W.H. Auden looked to cut the Victorian giant down to size—though many critics today consider that, in doing so, they were excessive. Yet in spite of what this new wave of poets perceived as a shallowness in Tennyson’s thought, they nevertheless begrudgingly acknowledged his lyrical power. Auden, who went as far as to call Tennyson “undoubtedly the stupidest” of the English poets, also admitted that he had “the finest ear” of them all.

With this decline in reputation came a decline in readership; in his 1992 poem “In Memoriam Alfred Lord Tennyson,” Mick Imlah reflects that “No one remembers you at all.” Over recent decades, scholars and critics have sought to rehabilitate Tennyson, establishing a more “balanced” view of his accomplishments and legacy, and celebrating him once again as a major poet of the English language. This updated appraisal acknowledges Tennyson’s shortcomings—especially evident when he strived, in long narrative poems and a number of unsuccessful plays, to venture beyond the lyricism he had mastered—while still recognizing his singular compositional skill and the real depth and innovation of his thought. Recent study has produced, as Parini notes, “sharp and persuasive critical readings that reveal the subtlety and depth of Tennyson’s massive body of work,” in particular his more complex and experimental poems like “Maud” and In Memoriam. The scholar Dinah Birch, for instance, has suggested that In Memoriam, with its unprecedented multiplicity and unconventional structure, actually predicted the work of the very modernists who derided it.

Alfred Tennyson was born on August 6, 1809, in the rural village of Somersby, in Lincolnshire. He was the fourth of 12 children; his father, an Anglican rector, provided him and his siblings with a broad education in literature and both classical and modern languages, and even as a preteen Tennyson had begun composing verse, variously imitating the Elizabethan poets, Milton, and Byron. In spite of his precociousness, however, Tennyson’s childhood was marred by the ever-worsening condition of his father. The elder Tennyson had been more or less disinherited by his own father, an ambitious and wealthy solicitor, and in response grew increasingly violent, unstable, abusive, and dependent on alcohol and drugs. His children inherited their father’s difficulties. Virtually all of the siblings suffered serious struggles with mental health, and several battled addiction throughout their lives. Tennyson once described his family, himself included, as “black-blooded.”

His 1827 enrolment at Cambridge’s Trinity College, then, was a joyful escape from the oppression of Somersby. In attending Cambridge, Tennyson followed his two older brothers, with whom he had produced a collection of poems the year before (confusingly titled Poems by Two Brothers). With this early publication, and his receipt of the Chancellor’s gold medal in poetry soon after arriving at Trinity, Tennyson attracted the attention of the Apostles, an intellectual secret society of the brightest minds at the university. The group regularly met to discuss abstract questions of philosophy; Tennyson, whose genius lay in his sense of the literary, not the theoretical, could not bring himself to present his first paper to the group, and resigned after a few meetings. Nevertheless, he remained close with the other members, whose support solidified Tennyson’s resolve to dedicate his life to poetry. In particular, he developed an intimate bond with Arthur Hallam, regarded by many as the leading light of his generation.

In 1830, Tennyson published his first collection, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical; Hallam’s laudatory review of the volume is considered one of the nineteenth century’s key poetic manifestos, and a foundational text of the Aesthetic movement. The bond between the young men grew only stronger when, about the same time, Hallam fell for Tennyson’s sister, Emily. The two announced their engagement, a decision which Hallam’s father reluctantly accepted in 1832. The year before, Tennyson’s own father had died, leaving his widow and children saddled with debts. The young poet was forced to leave Cambridge and return to Lincolnshire, where he acted almost as another parent to his younger siblings. The mental health of his older brothers, meanwhile, continued to deteriorate. Simultaneously, his second collection, which included important steps forward like “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Lady of Shalott,” released to withering reviews; John Wilson Croker (who had callously boasted that his judgment of “Endymion” helped bring on the death of Keats) excoriated Tennyson with particular venom in Quarterly Review. Already crumpling under the weight of these misfortunes, Tennyson was dealt the greatest emotional blow possible when Hallam, while touring Europe with his father in 1833, died suddenly in Vienna. Tennyson descended into utter despair: “I suffered,” he would later reflect, “what seemed to me to shatter all my life so that I desired to die rather than to live.”

And yet he continued to compose. In fact, the period immediately following Hallam’s death was one of Tennyson’s most productive, giving rise to poems like “Ulysses,” “St. Simeon Stylites,” and the first pieces of In Memoriam. These went unpublished—Tennyson, racked with grief and embittered by bad reviews, refused to consider releasing any of his work for a decade following his 1832 volume. In the mid-1830s, his family moved from Lincolnshire to the greater London area; Tennyson lived a somewhat itinerant life for much of the decade, drifting from place to place in and around the capital, drinking and smoking in deleterious excess, but nevertheless writing. In 1836, he began a courtship with Emily Sellwood, and the two planned to marry. By 1840, however, Tennyson had extinguished the relationship, a decision induced by financial anxieties combined with a harrowing fear that he had inherited his father’s epilepsy—and would pass it on to any children of his own. He often fell into inexplicable trances, which he took as evidence of the condition, then considered shameful and believed to be a result of lechery.

In 1842, at the encouragement of his friend Edward FitzGerald, Tennyson finally returned to the printing press. The result was Poems, a two-volume collection that comprised a dramatically-revised version of his 1832 publication, plus the work that he had produced over the previous decade. New releases ranged from “Locksley Hall” to “Morte d’Arthur,” encompassing a variety of themes and subjects. Critical reception, if not entirely enthusiastic, was far fairer than before. Finally, more of Tennyson’s contemporaries began to recognize his importance: in America, Edgar Allan Poe remarked that “I am not sure that [he] is not the greatest of poets.” Three years later, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel granted the poet a pension, providing him with the financial security he had lacked for most of his adult life. In 1848, doctors informed Tennyson that his trances were no indication of epilepsy. Two of his chief burdens had now been lifted, and soon he reestablished his relationship with Emily Sellwood. Meanwhile, his publisher encouraged him to assemble his Hallam four-liners as a unified work; In Memoriam appeared on June 1, 1850, to immense acclaim and astonishing popularity. Tennyson had displayed, in the words of Eliot, “the greatest lyrical resourcefulness that a poet has ever shown.” Within a couple of weeks, he and Emily were married.

Much of In Memoriam’s enormously and enduringly wide appeal can be attributed to the fact that the English public took it as a kind of “consolation manual” to turn to in times of grief. The Guardian’s obituary of Tennyson described it as a work “which so many delicate and loving souls know almost by heart, and which in the last resort gives the hopeful answer of faith to the terrible questions it propounds.” The poem served this function most famously for Queen Victoria herself, mourning in the wake of Prince Albert’s 1861 death—“Next to the Bible,” she said, “In Memoriam is my comfort.” Tennyson was nominated as poet laureate in 1851, succeeding Wordsworth, and in the following years he developed a friendship with the monarch and her consort. As laureate, Tennyson took on a national role, responding to the current affairs of England in poems like his “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” These are, in the words of Michael Schmidt, “masterpieces of the laureate art. Few laureates are so transparently sincere, prompt and prosodically competent in the execution of their duties.” Tennyson himself called such efforts “newspaper verse.”

In 1853, Tennyson and Emily moved to Farringford, a house on the Isle of Wight, where they lived for the rest of their lives, only occasionally decamping to stay at their mansion in Surrey. The couple had three sons, two of whom survived to adulthood; by all accounts, Alfred and Emily shared a fairly harmonious marriage. The pair reportedly danced in Farringford’s hall on days when it was too rainy for Tennyson to take his usual long, scenic walks. Emily was a devoted and tolerant partner, providing her husband’s life with a degree of stability and calm that ensured he could attend to his art at ease.

Tennyson remained prolific even into old age, and maintained his fame and success. In 1883, Queen Victoria elevated him to the peerage. As the century wore on, however, some of his contemporaries began to develop criticisms anticipating those that the modernists would issue after his death. In an 1879 letter, Gerard Manly Hopkins commented that Tennyson’s “gift of utterance is truly golden, but go further home and you come to thoughts commonplace and wanting in nobility.” Matthew Arnold expressed a similar sentiment: “The real truth is that Tennyson, with all his temperament and artistic skill, is deficient in intellectual power.” Oscar Wilde, in a letter to Walt Whitman, declared that “Tennyson’s rank is too well fixed and we love him too much. But he has not allowed himself to be a part of the living world and of the great currents of interest and action. He is of priceless value and yet he lives apart from his time. He lives in a dream of the unreal. We, on the other hand, move in the very heart of today.” The critic Edmund Gosse put forth a more forgiving verdict, on the occasion of Tennyson’s 80th birthday:

He is wise and full of intelligence; but in mere intellectual capacity or attainment it is probable that there are many who excel him…He has not headed a single moral reform nor inaugurated a single revolution of opinion; he has never pointed the way to undiscovered regions of thought; he has never stood on tip-toe to describe new worlds that his fellows were not tall enough to discover ahead. In all these directions he has been prompt to follow, quick to apprehend, but never himself a pioneer. Where then has his greatness lain? It has lain in the various perfections of his writing. He has written, on the whole, with more constant, unwearied, and unwearying excellence than any of his contemporaries…He has expended the treasures of his native talent on broadening and deepening his own hold upon the English language, until that has become an instrument upon which he is able to play a greater variety of melodies to perfection than any other man.

Tennyson died on October 6, 1892, in the company of his family, with an open volume of Shakespeare in his hands. He was laid to rest in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, near the tombs of Chaucer and Browning. In his last years, Tennyson had grown increasingly troubled by the questions that haunt In Memoriam, in large part the result of his son Lionel’s untimely death in 1886. Yet he never gave up his belief in the existence of something “behind the veil.” This holdout hope is reflected in “Crossing the Bar,” a poem he composed in 1889, on the brief trip from the Isle of Wight to the mainland. At his request, it has been appended to all editions of his poetry published since.

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,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.