Examine Tennyson's life and works. *
Ans.After Wordsworth, it was Tennyson who became the Poet Laureate, the representative voice of Victorian England. Not only did he write several volumes of poems but Tennyson also wrote drama, though his fame rests primarily on his poetry. Most of us have read/heard his famous lines: The old order changeth, yielding place to new And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world The Passing of Ar.hur Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), was born at a village in Lincolnshire, where his father was a rector. A rector is a clergyman in charge of a parish. Tennyson was the fourth child in a large family of twelve children. Even as a child, he preferred solititude and wrote his first poem at the age of eight. Most people think of Tennyson as a very serious person. Few know that he wrote a hilarious play The Devil and the Lady when he was only fourteen. Educated at the local grammar school, Tennyson went to Cambridge University in 1828 where he became close to Arthur Henry Hallam. Subsequently Hallam was engaged to Tennyson's sister. When his father died in 1830, Tennyson left the university without a degree and pul lished his poems, Chiefly Lyrical. His second volume The Lady of Shalott and Other Poems (1832) was viciously attacked muc: to the dismay of the sensitive poet. But the poet faced his darkest days on the death of his dear friend Arthur Hallam who died at the age of 22. The shattered Tennyson wrote In Memoriam (1850) which was published several years after Hallam's death. Tennyson married Emily Sellwood in 1850 and became the Poet Laureate after Wordsworth. He won much public acclaim but his gifts seemed to have declined after In Memoriam. As a later poet Laureate Alfred Austin put it 'his fame.... increascd precisely as his genuine poetical power... steadily waned'. However, Tennyson's memorable verse has earned him a permanent place among the greatest writers the world has ever seen. Among Tennyson's major poetic achievements is the elegy mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, "In Memoriam" (1850). The patriotic poem "Charge of the Light Brigade", published in Maud (1855), is one of Tennyson's best known works, although at first "Maud" was found obscure or morbid by critics ranging from George Eliot to Gladstone. Enoch Arden (1864) was based on a true story of a sailor thought drowned at sea who returned home after several years to find that his wife had remarried. Idylls Of The King (1859-1885) dealt with the Arthurian theme.
In the 1870s, Tennyson wrote several plays including the poetic dramas Queen Mary (1875) and Harold (1876). In 1884, he was created a baron. Tennyson died at Aldwort on October 6, 1892, at the age of eighty-three and was buried in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
0 Comments