Today, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry is widely known and appreciated, though this was not always the case. In his early years of writing his poems were criticized for content and style of writing. This strongly impacted Tennyson and caused him once to cease writing for nine years. Tennyson’s childhood influenced his writing and this is often seen in many of his poems. He was regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. He become Poet Laureate in 1850 and was appointed by Queen Victoria and served 42 years. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry was greatly influenced by his early childhood, best friend and religious beliefs; while his rhyme scheme was traditional; his morbid style was not popular for his time. This melancholy style of writing and use of topics of moral and intellectual beliefs of his time were especially vulnerable for later critic.
Tennyson’s life at home wasn’t always a happy one. His father, George, began tutoring Tennyson after four unhappy years of schooling. George tutored his sons in classical and modern languages. However, George, along with some of Tennyson’s brothers, suffered from bouts of epilepsy. One of Tennyson’s brother’s had violent quarrels with his father, one was confined to an insane asylum later in life and yet another became an opium addict. George often suffered from depression and his drinking led to him becoming violent, abusive and paranoid. “Tennyson’s grandfather appointed his uncle his heir and his father was placed in the ministry.” (The Victorian Web) This great difference in money between his own family and his aunt and uncle’s led Tennyson to worry about money the length of his life. In 1827 Tennyson left his home in hope of a better life. He followed two of his ol...
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...s very appealing.
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry was greatly influenced by his environment. His father was a clergyman whom later in life experienced epilepsy and would fall into bouts of drinking and depression. His very close friend and brother-in-law Hallam died suddenly, leaving Tennyson stung and deeply saddened. His wife Emily Sellwood’s family cancelled their wedding when he lost his money, only to rearrange it when he became a well-known writer. In some part of each of Tennyson’s poems you will find an example of his life, or his feelings about his life and happenings. “T.S. Eliot has called him ‘the great master of metric as well as of melancholia’ and that that he possessed the finest ear of any English poet since Milton.” (Online Literature) Despite Tennyson’s family history with health problems he lived a long life and died at the 83 on October 6, 1892
In Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Maud (1855), the speaker confronts the shameful fate of dead remains and evaluates the role of nonliving materials such as hair, bones, shells, and rocks. Although critics rarely comment on the geological process in the poem, in-depth analysis of Maud reveals an underlying message about purpose and fate through fossilization. By analyzing Tennyson’s background, experiences, and lines in Maud, I argue that Maud is a “selving” poem as the speaker questions what happens to his remains and his legacy after he is gone. Additionally, the poem is a critique on how society devalues the living out of greed. To achieve this message, Tennyson utilizes his experience and studies of geological processes and fossilization to create a narrative out of the past for the present.
Alfred Tennyson breaks away from the pastoral discourse that is typical of the Romantic Age and transcends into the Victorian Age with a poem full of obsession, madness, death, love, and patriotism in his creation of Maud. In Maud, the state of the speaker’s life and his mental health are called into question from the very beginning. The speaker’s initial mental state is one of madness, a melancholic, morbidity that has been influenced by the suicide of his father into a persona that is not perfect or happy, but a disturbed man with nothing to recommend him to a higher state. We see this morbid side immediately when he says, “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, / Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood- / red heath, / The red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, / And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers / “Death.” (I,1-4). The speaker is already preoccupied with death and loss. He is all about thinking in extremes. The extremes of death, love, loss, and patriotism permeate his personality with such intensity that everything in his life is an obsession. The intensity of the character creates a situation where he never operates in the middle. He is always very high or very low either in anguish or happiness. It can be argued that his madness resonates as different phases of obsessions and that sanity at the end is not an arguable point as the reader never actually sees him operating within a sane situation. The speaker’s patriotic discourse in Part III is just one more obsession, another faucet of his internal madness that has found an alternate focus. The speaker’s is caught in a weave of madness that is present throughout ...
I think that in Tennyson’s poems, The Lady of Shalott and Mariana. The central female characters are presented to us in the way that Tennyson views women and their roles in society. There “Tennyson had great sympathy for women and the ways in which they lives were restricted to.” Write the ways in which Tennyson presents the lives of women in some poems you have read in the past.
For some individuals, poetry is a form of freedom and expression. It is one of the many creative ways to release feelings of anger and happiness from the human mind. The intensity of every rhythm and word, and style of each poem allows readers to uncover deeper significance to the context. The rich variety achieved by mixing a combination of human imagination and reality to tell a story with deeper meaning is remarkable. This concept of combining poems and human imagination together was popularized by Edgar Allan Poe. Living an impoverished life, Poe penned stories of horror and mystery into collections of poems and short stories. He expressed his thoughts on paper with great thrill and excitement. Known for his wild imagination that included suspenseful, dark tales, he posed as a literary figure and inspired many across the world.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “Maud; A Monodrama.” Tennyson’s Poetry. Ed. Robert W. Hill New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. 214-215.
Blunden, Edmund and Heinemann, Eds. “Tennyson.” Selected Poems. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1960. p.1. print.
Riede, G, David.. "Tennyson's poetics of melancholy and the imperial imagination." Studies in English Literature, 1500 - 1900 4(2000):659. eLibrary. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, one of the mid-Victorian's most celebrated poets of the time, was genius in "eloquently presenting the anxieties and aspirations of his era" (Longman p. 1909). Trademarks of Victorian life included questioning faith, the Bible, the past, and the self. More and more people were interested in the industry of man rather than the uniqueness of nature, and progress of society proved that man was made to dominate and take everything for himself. Tennyson greatly recognized this trend as "he called attention to the industrialized misery and revolutionary anger of the poor" (Longman p. 1909-08) produced by the industrial progress in the mid-1800s.
v. Osborne, K.. Kissel, A. (ed.) (2013)’Tennyson's Poems Study Guide : Summary and Analysis of "Crossing the Bar’. [Online] at http://www.gradesaver.com/tennysons-poems/study-guide/section4/" (accessed 8 January 2014).
common goal to get the reader to believe in their view of war. We see
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born and lived in a time of rapid growth and changing attitudes and beliefs. During the reign of Queen Victoria, Britain saw itself become the leaders into the future through dominance of politics and economy. Industry took center stage, while religion and faith came under careful scrutiny. The Victorian period swiftly became not only an age of urbanization and utilitarianism, but an age of social reform as “voting rights were extended, [and] working conditions improved”(Henderson and Sharpe, p. 1059). A moral and emotional behavioral conservatism ruled the class system and it’s institutions, while question’s about a woman’s place among society came even more sharply into view than in the past. The Victorian’s even saw a change in literature, as publishing became yet another
as if you are one of the Light Brigade. With this war language he uses
Alfred Lord Tennyson was born August 6, 1809, at Somersby, Lincolnshire. He was the fourth of twelve children. As a boy he led a very miserable and unhappy life. In 1828 Tennyson entered Trinity college, Cambridge. The most important part of his experience there was his friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam, who was the son of a well known historian. Hallam encouraged and inspired Tennyson to write. Hallam died in 1833. Tennyson published poems in 1842 which proved to be a great success and secured his position as the foremost Victorian Poet. The year 1850 was important to Tennyson for two reasons: his marriage to Emily Sellwood and the publication of "In Memoriam" , his great elegy to Arthur Hallam. "In Memoriam’ was merely a verification of some of the books that Tennyson had been reading" (Wiley 160). These books included Lyell and Darwin. Many of the lines in his poem show an interesting compromise between religious attitude and what is quite a different belief, the belief in human perfectibility. "In Memoriam" can be justly called a religious poem. However it is not religious because of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its Faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience.
Since its original publication in 1889, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” consistently appears as the final poem in all collections of his work. Written late in Tennyson’s life, the poem seems to serve as a reflection on the inevitability of death while being simultaneously inviting, as the poem asks for the audience not to mourn in a traditional sense. Unlike many of Tennyson’s other works, this poem does not fully envelop the audience in a sense of melancholy; instead, “Crossing the Bar” invites a stronger, more final contemplation on the cyclical nature of life and death. I argue iambic meter with irregular feet, consistent end rhyme, alliteration, and metaphor are essential formalist aspects of “Crossing the Bar” that work in
Tennyson's poetry has stood the test of time because it successfully paints a time and place and reflects the feelings of the people in it. His ability to capture the feelings of uncertainty and loss that were characteristic of this time period, through his use of descriptions, diction, and pathetic fallacy made his poetry not only pleasing to the ear, but also historically important. He surpassed Wordsworth and other poets of his generation as Poet Laureate because his poems capture the important social issues of the Victorian Age such as the shift in religious belief as a result of science, the confusion surrounding women's roles in society, and the isolation that came as a result of the rapid social and economical changes that occurred.