Tennysons Life Poetry

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria’s favourite poet, commanded a wider readership than any other of his time. His ascendancy was neither the triumph of pure genius nor an accident of history:he skilfully crafted his own career and his relationships with his audience. Fame and recognition came, lavishly and in abundance, but the hunger for more never left him. Like many successful Victorians, he was a provincial determined to make good in the capital while retaining his regional strengths. One of eleven children, he remained close to his extended family and never lost his Lincolnshire accent.Resolving never to be anything except ‘a poet’, he wore his hair long, smoked incessantly and sported a cloak and wide-brimmed Spanish hat. Tennyson ranged widely in his poetry, turning his interests in geology, evolution and Arthurian legend into verse, but much of his workrelates to his personal life. The tragic loss of Arthur Hallam, a brilliant friend and fellow Apostle at Cambridge, fed into some of his most successful and best-known poems. It took Tennyson seventeen years to complete his great elegy for Hallam, In Memoriam, a work which established his fame and secured his appointment as Poet Laureate. The poet who wrote The Lady of Shalott and The Charge of the Light Brigade has become a permanent part of our culture. This enjoyable and thoughtful new biography shows him as a Romantic as well as a Victorian, exploring both the poems and Tennyson’s attempts at play writing, as well as the pressures of his age and the personal relationships that made the man.

Seeking to understand Tennyson's poetry as the work of a man concerned with making and then living up one of the most famous names in literature, Anna Barton offers close readings of major works from his early lyrics to his Arthurian Idylls. The laureate's keen sense of professional identity, Barton argues, forced him to grapple with modern concerns about the ethics of print in a market-driven age as he established his own responsible poetic.

Treasury of verse by the great Victorian poet includes the famous long narrative poem, Enoch Arden, plus "The Lady of Shalott," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Break, break, break," "Flower in the crannied Wall" and more. Also included are excerpts from three longer works: The Princess, "Maud" and "The Brook."

Tennyson s central poem is presented with an extensive introduction that provides background information on the poet and poem as well as an overview of In Memoriam s formal and thematic peculiarities, including Tennyson s use of the stanza and the poem s rhyme scheme."