(no subject)
Tennyson's poetic output covers a breadth difficult to comprehend in a single system of thematics: his various works treat issues of political and historical concern, as well as scientific matters, classical mythology, and deeply personal thoughts and feelings. Tennyson is both a poet of penetrating introspection and a poet of the people; he plumbs the depths of his own consciousness while also giving voice to the national consciousness of Victorian society.
As a child, Tennyson was influenced profoundly by the poetry of Byron and Scott, and his earliest poems reflect the lyric intensity and meditative expressiveness of his Romantic forebears.
Not only is Tennyson a poet of the natural and psychological landscape, he also attends frequently to the past, and historical events. "The Lady of Shalott" and the poems within Idylls of the King take place in medieval England and capture a world of knights in shining a rmor and their damsels in distress. {treats the history of his nation}
Tennyson's personal past, too, figures prominently in his work. The sudden death of his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam when Tennyson was just 24 dealt a great emotional blow to the young poet, who spent the next ten years writing over a hundred poems dedicated to his departed friend, later collected and published as "In Memoriam" in 1850. This lengthy work describes Tennyson's memories of the time he spent with Hallam, including their Cambridge days, when Hallam would read poetry aloud to his friends
also reflects Tennyson's struggle with the Victorians' growing awareness of another sort of past: the vast expanse of geological time and evolutionary history. The new discoveries in biology, astronomy, and geology implied a view of humanity that much distressed many Victorians, including Tennyson. In Maud,, for example, he describes the stars as "cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand/ His nothingness into man"; unlike the Romantics, he possessed a painful awareness of the brutality and indifference of "Nature red in tooth and claw." Although Tennyson associated evolution with progress, he also worried that the notion seemed to contradict the Biblical story of creation and long-held assumptions about man's place in the world
(Remeber&^ his father was a clergy man) but also heavy drinker..
born in Sommersby, England on August 6, 1809, twenty years after the start of the French Revolution and toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
As a child, Tennyson was influenced profoundly by the poetry of Byron and Scott, and his earliest poems reflect the lyric intensity and meditative expressiveness of his Romantic forebears.
Not only is Tennyson a poet of the natural and psychological landscape, he also attends frequently to the past, and historical events. "The Lady of Shalott" and the poems within Idylls of the King take place in medieval England and capture a world of knights in shining a rmor and their damsels in distress. {treats the history of his nation}
Tennyson's personal past, too, figures prominently in his work. The sudden death of his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam when Tennyson was just 24 dealt a great emotional blow to the young poet, who spent the next ten years writing over a hundred poems dedicated to his departed friend, later collected and published as "In Memoriam" in 1850. This lengthy work describes Tennyson's memories of the time he spent with Hallam, including their Cambridge days, when Hallam would read poetry aloud to his friends
also reflects Tennyson's struggle with the Victorians' growing awareness of another sort of past: the vast expanse of geological time and evolutionary history. The new discoveries in biology, astronomy, and geology implied a view of humanity that much distressed many Victorians, including Tennyson. In Maud,, for example, he describes the stars as "cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand/ His nothingness into man"; unlike the Romantics, he possessed a painful awareness of the brutality and indifference of "Nature red in tooth and claw." Although Tennyson associated evolution with progress, he also worried that the notion seemed to contradict the Biblical story of creation and long-held assumptions about man's place in the world
(Remeber&^ his father was a clergy man) but also heavy drinker..
born in Sommersby, England on August 6, 1809, twenty years after the start of the French Revolution and toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars.