Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson was a Lincolnshire rector’s son who lost his closest friend Arthur Hallam at twenty-four and spent seventeen years on the elegy, In Memoriam, that made him Poet Laureate in 1850 and the voice of Victorian faith and doubt. Ulysses, Tithonus, The Lady of Shalott, The Charge of the Light Brigade and the twelve Idylls of the King on Arthur’s court are the rest of the Poems the lists assign. He was made a baron in 1884, the first poet so honoured, and asked that Crossing the Bar close every edition. His ear was the finest in English verse since Milton.