Alfred Tennyson is one of the most popular poets of all time. Born the fourth son in a family of twelve children, Tennyson endured a solitary and unhappy childhood, in large part due to his violent, alcoholic father. He was educated at home by his father, and began to write poetry at a young age. He studied at Cambridge, and became involved with a debating society called the Apostles, and in particular with a student named A.H. Hallam. Hallam later became engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily, but died suddenly in 1833 of apoplexy. The death of this close friend inspired much of Tennyson's future poetry. Tennyson married, following a lengthy engagement, in 1850.
Tennyson won a prize for poetry at Cambridge in 1829; his first volume of
poetry, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, appeared a year later. His reputation
as a rising lyric voice gradually rose through the publication of subsequent
volumes to the extent that he received a government pension in
1845. He published The Princess, a response to the Woman Question
in 1847, and his major elegy to Hallam, In Memoriam in 1850. He
became poet laureate on Wordsworth's death in the same year. By the
mid-fifties Tennyson had a vast and appreciative audience, including
the Queen. He continued his steady output of verse for the rest of
his life, experimenting with form in Maud, producing a lengthy treatment
of Arthurian romance in Idylls of the King, and branching out into
historical drama. Although possibly the most musical of all English
poets, Tennyson's work has been criticized for its lack of intellectual depth,
for instance by Swinburne, who parodied him in
"The
Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell."