Alfred Tennyson

TENNYSON, Alfred. b. Somersby, Lincolnshire, 6 August 1809; d. Haslemere, Surrey, 6 October 1892. He was the son of the rector of Somersby, educated at Louth Grammar School, and then privately. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, leaving in 1831 without taking a degree, but having published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830). At Cambridge he became friendly with the brilliant Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-33), whose sudden death, and the reflections upon it, were the cause of Tennyson’s most famous poem, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850). He was appointed Poet Laureate in the same year, and in the decades that followed he was regarded as the greatest poet of his age, publishing Maud, and Other...