An Argument for the Awesomeness of Tennyson

                                                                            

                    “I hold it true, whate'er befall;

                    “I feel it when I sorrow most;

                  “ ‘Tis better to have loved and lost

                    "Than never to have loved at all."

Everyone has heard the latter part of this stanza at least once in their lifetime, but not everyone knows who penned these famous words about love and loss. The author was Alfred “Eccentric” Lord Tennyson, one of the greatest poets who ever lived, and certainly the greatest poet of his time.

Alfred was born in England, the fourth of twelve children, in 1809, the same year in which Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were also born. When he was eighteen in 1827 he left to study at Cambridge, where he became part of a literary group called the “Apostles”. He toured Europe with his best friend Hallam, who later became engaged to Alfred’s sister Emily. In 1833 Alfred went back home, no longer able to afford college tuition, and it was there that he learned that Hallam had died suddenly of fever while travelling abroad. His terrible grief at his friend’s death influenced much of his later poetry, especially the great elegy “In Memoriam.”

In 1850 William Wordsworth, Britain’s Poet Laureate, died, and Tennyson was named to take his place. He married Emily Sellwood, whom he had loved since 1836, and they moved in 1853 to a country house on the Isle of Wight where they raised two sons named Hallam and Lionel. Later in life Tennyson continued to write and gain popularity, and his poetry began to follow a narrative style. In 1884 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert granted Alfred a baronetcy. In 1892 he died at the age of 83 from heart failure and was buried in Westminster Abby. 

Although Tennyson was popular in his own day, his successors the Edwardians and Georgians of the early 1900s often mocked and ridiculed him, accusing him of escapism in his themes of knights, Camelot, and chivalry. Today, however, many critics consider him the greatest poet of the Victorian age. From Milton to Tennyson there was no poet combining in his person all the skills of expressing detail, love and reverence for God, optimism, and penetrating introspection with uniqueness, nor has there been one since Tennyson. To the critics, four predominant poetic traits make Alfred Lord Tennyson the greatest poet of the Victorians – to me, they make him one of the greatest poets in the history of language. These are: his skill in portraying details such as color, how he stands out from the other Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats, the method by which his poems culminate in optimism and hope in God, and, most importantly, his belief in and reverence for God.

 One of Tennyson’s most prevailing characteristics is his ability to convey color to the mind’s eye of the reader. For example, in “The Lady of Shalott”, Sir Lancelot’s attire is described in rich detail: “All in the blue unclouded weather / Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather / The helmet and the helmet-feather / Burn’d like one burning flame together / As he rode down to Camelot. / As often thro’ the purple night / Below the starry clusters bright / Some bearded meteor, trailing light / Moves over still Shalott. / His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d / On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode / From underneath his helmet flow’d / His coal-black curls as on he rode / As he rode down to Camelot.”

Tennyson learned much of this sense of imagery from Keats, but his portrayals are vivid rather than vague, his colors brilliant in imagination rather than soft and fanciful. In “Morte d’Arthur”, Excalibur's hilt "twinkled with diamond sparks, / Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work / Of subtlest jewelry.” Tennyson was famous for these passages of sparkling color and poetic artistry and it is one of the strongest points of his poetry. As an early twentieth century critic praises this ability; “His appreciation for sensuous beauty, especially color, is acute…his descriptions are magnificently beautiful, often with much detail…Add the truth and tenderness of his emotion, and it results that he is one of the finest and most moving of lyric poets.” (Alfred Tennyson from A History of English Literature, by Robert Huntington Fletcher, 1918)

Another one of Tennyson’s greatest assets was his singularity among all of the other Romantic poets, including Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. He stands alone in many of his themes, motifs, and symbols, as well as his modes of expression and ideals. Unlike the other Romantics, who viewed nature as a sort of thing to be worshipped, Tennyson put nature into its proper perspective as a medium expressing and pointing the way towards the higher Creator Being. Some of his predominant themes are, the reconciliation of religion and science, the virtues of perseverance and optimism, and the glory of England, while some of Keats’ prevailing themes consist of the inevitability of death and the worship of beauty in nature, (“Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty.”) Wordsworth mourned the passing of England’s glory and Coleridge is notorious for a certain bizarre use of language and remoteness from reality –these characteristically Romantic traits contrast Tennyson’s reverence for England and for the importance of accurate scientific detail in his poetry. Undoubtedly Tennyson was influenced by his Romantic predecessors, but he veered from their path in numerous ways, and became the father of Victorian poetry in so doing.

   Out of Tennyson’s poetic themes, extolling the virtues of optimism is one of the greatest and most unique – after his best friend’s death he struggled through a time of intense despair, which he eventually overcame. Many of his poems exemplify this struggle with despair and hope, culminating in the ultimate victory of optimism over depression, and the realization of the need to carry on trusting in God. This need for perseverance is best expressed in the works “Ulysses” and “In Memoriam,” but it also appears in “The Lotos Eaters”, “The Lady of Shalott”, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The latter two glorify characters who embrace their destinies in the face of death.

The ideas of Tennyson’s poetry are noble, yet conservative, expressing the Victorian ideals of his time. Instead of becoming confused and straying from religion because of the scientific discoveries of his time, as so many Christians did, he used his poetry to reconcile this newly discovered science with God.

God is essentially the optimism of Tennyson’s poetry. It is best expressed in his long “In Memoriam”, a series of short poems woven together to create an elegy to his dead friend, Arthur Hallam. It begins as a tribute to the “Strong Son of God”, and folds out into the argument that, though man, never having seen God’s face, has no proof of His existence, he can still reach God through faith. Tennyson attributes the sun and moon to God, acknowledging Him as the creator of life and death. The Son of God Tennyson portrays as both human and divine – man controls his own will, but the Son of God has also predestined each man for a purpose. The speaker in “In Memoriam” expresses the hope that “knowledge [of God will] grow from more to more” though this knowledge should be combined with a reverence for God’s incalculable wisdom. The speaker also repeatedly asks that God would forgive him for his grief for “Thy creature, whom I found so fair.” Yet Tennyson concludes the poem with the hope that his best friend lives on in a better and higher World.

 “In Memoriam” is seen as the ultimate expression of Tennyson’s belief in God; “In religion, his inherited belief, rooted in his deepest fibers, early found itself confronted by the discoveries of modern science, which at first seemed to him to proclaim that the universe is much what it seemed to the young Carlyle, a remorseless monster, 'red in tooth and claw,' scarcely thinkable as the work of a Christian God who cares for man. Tennyson was too sincere to evade the issue, and after years of inner struggle he arrived at a positive faith in the central principles of Christianity.” (Alfred Tennyson from A History of English Literature, by Robert Huntington Fletcher, 1918

Thus Tennyson stands alone on a pedestal of greatness, for though the Romantic Keats and Wordsworth had genius, they did not have belief in God, and their genius was misplaced worshipping ideas such as Nature and Innocence. Though many more modern poets following Tennyson have used their poetry and genius to glorify God, they have not expressed their ideals as exquisitely, nor with as much skill, as Tennyson has done. His vivid and beautiful use of the English language combined with the wide variety of  poetic forms he mastered, such as lyrics, ballads, “descriptive poems, sentimental reveries, and idyls; long narratives, in which he displays perfect narrative skill; delightfully realistic character-sketches, some of them in dialect; dramas; and meditative poems, long and short, on religious, ethical, and social questions”, (Alfred Tennyson from A History of English Literature, by Robert Huntington Fletcher, 1918) place him among the great geniuses of literature. Alternatively, his departure from the accepted and usual themes and ideals of these geniuses set him apart into his own category of greatness, reserved only for those masters who gave glory to their Giver for their mastery.