Annamarie Russo, age 17, of New Bedford, Mass., for her question:
WHY IS LORD TENNYSON CONSIDERED A GREAT POET?
Lord Alfred Tennyson was one of the most important English poets of the 1800s. He still stands today as one of the supreme craftsmen in the English language.
Tennyson is considered great because of the remarkable range he displayed with his natural talents. Most of the experts agree that perhaps no English poet had a more acute ear for fine shades of poetic expression or a greater range of verse style.
The poet's fine lyrics perfectly express emotions and experiences shared by all people. It was not at all surprising that he succeeded William Wordsworth as England's poet laureate in 1850.
Tennyson was born on August 6, 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. He was the son of a clergyman who was in charge of a parish. He started writing poetry early in his life and many of his first poems told of life in the land of the lonely marshes in eastern England.
Tennyson entered Cambridge University in 1828 but did not stay long enough to earn a degree. At Cambridge, however, he did join a society of undergraduates called "The Apostles." A number of members in the group became intellectual leaders of the age.
One of Tennyson's most intimate friends was a university friend named Arthur Hallam. Hallam's sudden death in 1833 was the crucial event in the poet's otherwise uneventful life. Tennyson expressed his grief and senses of loss in his great elegy "In Memoriam" in 1850. An elegy is a poem mourning someone's death.
Tennyson went on to become the most popular British poet of the Victorian era. He married in 1850 and lived quietly in his country homes at Farringford on the Isle of Wight and Aldworth in Surrey. He avoided public life.
The poet's works showed his consistent insiration and creative vitality. He was awarded the title of Baron Tennyson in 1883 by Queen Victoria. He died in 1892.
"In Memoriam" became Tennyson's philosophic masterpiece. It was composed of 133 individual poems. The work traces the author's anguished but triumphant efforts to conquer the religious doubt common at the time, partly because of current theories about evolution.
The people of Tennyson's day, torn between faith and doubt, reported that they gained consolation from the poem's affirmation that men may rise to higher things.
Tennyson's most characteristic form of poetry was the idyll, a poem about country life developed by the ancient Greeks. These poems often take the form of dramatic reveries, or daydreams, spoken by mythical figures.
Each poem tells a story but depends primarily on the creation of mood through the power of richly described settings.
Tennyson's lifelong fascination with King Arthur and his knights led to his most ambitious work, "Idylls of the King." It is a series of 12 narrative poems that he published with constant revisions between 1842 and 1885.
The poet is buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.