Alfred, Lord Tennyson, photographed by Elliott & Fry, late 1860s. Wikimedia Commons · public domain.
Poet · Pairing VI
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809–1892 · Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, 1850–1892
“Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.”
Alfred Tennyson was the defining poet of the Victorian age — and, for more than forty years, its official one. Appointed Poet Laureate in 1850 after the death of Wordsworth, he gave the era many of its most quoted lines and became a national institution, eventually raised to the peerage as Baron Tennyson (hence “Lord”).
His verse is prized for its music: an extraordinary ear for rhythm and sound that could make even grief or disaster ring with dignity. That same gift is central to “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), written after he read a newspaper account of a catastrophic cavalry charge in the Crimean War. Its galloping meter turns blundering slaughter into an anthem of duty — the very effect a later generation of war poets would set out to dismantle.
Tennyson’s major works range from the long elegy In Memoriam A.H.H., written over years for his lost friend Arthur Hallam, to the Arthurian cycle Idylls of the King and lyric masterpieces like “Ulysses” and “The Lady of Shalott.” He remains one of the most frequently quoted poets in the English language.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing VI — The Reality of Conflict →