1809-1892 · English poet, Poet Laureate of Victorian Britain
About Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), son of a Lincolnshire rector, became the leading poet of Victorian England. The death of his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833 shaped his work for decades, above all In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850). He was made Poet Laureate in 1850 and a baron in 1884, and his poems include The Lady of Shalott, Ulysses, The Charge of the Light Brigade and Idylls of the King.
“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
written 1833; published 1842 · 19th Century · Poetry
Ulysses is a seventy-line dramatic monologue in blank verse that Tennyson wrote in October 1833, within weeks of learning that his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, had died suddenly in Vienna. He published it in his two-volume Poems of 1842.