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Alfred Tennyson was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby, Lincolnshire, the fourth of twelve children of the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson, the rector, and his wife Elizabeth Fytche. His father, a learned but troubled man, taught the boys at home, and Alfred was writing verse in imitation of Pope, Scott, and Byron while still a child. In 1827 he and his brother Charles published Poems by Two Brothers, and the same year he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge.
At Cambridge Tennyson joined the Apostles, a debating society, and formed the closest friendship of his life with Arthur Henry Hallam. He won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for his poem “Timbuctoo” in 1829 and published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in 1830, followed by Poems (dated 1833), which included early versions of “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Lotos-Eaters.” His father’s death in 1831 forced him to leave Cambridge without a degree. In 1833 Hallam died suddenly in Vienna at the age of twenty-two, a loss that shaped Tennyson’s poetry for the rest of his life.
For nearly ten years Tennyson published almost nothing, but he kept writing. The two-volume Poems of 1842, with “Ulysses,” “Morte d’Arthur,” “Locksley Hall,” and “Break, Break, Break,” made his name. The Princess followed in 1847. In 1850 he published In Memoriam A.H.H., the long elegy for Hallam he had worked on for seventeen years; the same year he married Emily Sellwood and succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate.
As Laureate Tennyson wrote “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (1852) and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), and he became the most popular poet in Britain. He settled at Farringford on the Isle of Wight and later built Aldworth in Sussex. Maud appeared in 1855, Idylls of the King, his cycle of Arthurian poems, from 1859, and Enoch Arden in 1864. He also wrote verse dramas, and in 1884 he was made Baron Tennyson, the first English writer raised to the peerage for his literary work.
Tennyson kept publishing into his eighties, with Tiresias (1885), Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), and Demeter and Other Poems (1889), which closed with “Crossing the Bar.” He died at Aldworth on 6 October 1892, at the age of eighty-three, and was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.
The poem texts on Poetry Catalog follow public domain nineteenth-century editions of Tennyson’s poems, so spelling and punctuation (such as “thro’” and “’d” endings) may differ slightly from modern editions. For the linked list of his poems on this site, visit Alfred, Lord Tennyson Poems.