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Alfred, Lord Tennyson
British Poet Laureate, 1850 Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (August 6, 1809 – October 6, 1892) was the most popular English poet of the high Victorian age. A favorite of the royal family, Tennyson was appointed poet laureate by Queen Victoria and served for 42 years after the poet William Wordsworth . Like much Victorian literature following the Romanticism of Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge Lord Byron John Keats , and William Blake , Tennyson's poetry turned from Romantic sentiment to a more stern, moralizing tone. Tennyson had a style far more attenuated, focused, and sober than that of those of the poets who had preceded him. In both style and attitude, Tennyson's verse strikingly resembled the poetry of Wordsworth's later years, to which it is often compared. Like Wordsworth, Tennyson was generally reserved in his political opinions, and his conservatism was evident in his choice of subject matter. Shying away from the fanciful poetry of the previous generation, Tennyson's material is largely grounded in the classics, and two of his greatest works ( Idylls of the King and Ulysses ) are concerned with two very old, very much respected legends of King Arthur, and | |
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