Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Born in 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the fourth of twelve children in a clergyman's household shadowed by alcoholism, epilepsy, and bitter disinheritance, Tennyson found refuge in poetry before he was ten. At Cambridge he joined the Apostles and formed an intense friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam, whose sudden death in Vienna in 1833, at twenty-two, became the defining wound of Tennyson's life and art. Hallam's loss produced In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), a cycle of 131 lyrics written over seventeen years that transformed private grief into a Victorian meditation on faith, doubt, and evolution. The poem so moved Prince Albert that Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate within weeks of its publication, a post he would hold for forty-two years, longer than anyone in the office's history. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854) became the most famous war poem in English almost overnight. Idylls of the King (1859-1885) retold the Arthurian legends as an allegory of civilizational decline that haunted the imperial imagination. He refused a baronetcy twice before accepting a peerage in 1884, becoming the first English poet raised to the House of Lords solely for his writing. He died at Aldworth on October 6, 1892, with a volume of Shakespeare open in his hand, and was buried in Poets' Corner beside Robert Browning.

In the late 1830s Tennyson poured his inheritance into Dr. Matthew Allen's scheme to carve wood by steam-driven machine. It collapsed around 1840, taking much of the family money with it. Too poor to marry, he broke off his engagement to Emily Sellwood and sank into years of depression before fame finally reached him.