Alfred, Lord Tennyson was a force to be reckoned with on the Victorian literary scene. He wrote one of the most popular poems of the 19th century: In Memoriam, an extended reflection on the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam. Queen Victoria herself was a huge fan (she was also, dare we say, the type of person to take mourning to new heights—or depths).

Tennyson also snagged the post of Poet Laureate in 1850, after the death of William Wordsworth. It was a sign of the times. The old Romantic poet was dead, and the eminently Victorian Tennyson took center stage.

In Memoriam

Tennyson wrote this poem over the course of seventeen years—a long time to work on one poem, wouldn't you say? And it's a long one, 133 cantos in all. The subject is the mourning process, and there are a whole lot more than five stages to Tennyson's grief.

It's all written in a distinct form that Tennyson made his own: ABBA stanzas in iambic tetrameter (still sometimes called the In Memoriam stanza). It's easy to get lost in the poem's reflections on love and loss, but, from Christmastimes that seem to remind everyone of Hallam to Tennyson's sister's marriage, it does have a storyline to keep us grounded.

Idylls of the King

The Idylls are a series of poems that Tennyson wrote about King Arthur—from how he became king and married Guinevere, to the adventures of the Knights, to the crumbling of the court.

King Arthur was all the rage in the 19th century. The Pre-Raphaelite school of painters also jumped on this bandwagon (for a quick example, here's Edward Burne-Jones's Beguiling of Merlin). But Tennyson's version paints a pretty bleak picture: sure, everything starts out all sunshine and kittens, but it slowly gets pulled apart by betrayals and in-fighting. It can make you wonder what Tennyson really thought about Victorian progress.

Chew on This:

Tennyson fed the King Arthur fire with "The Lady of Shalott". And the Pre-Raphaelites were ready with illustrations—check out John William Waterhouse's version. Critics are always proposing different things that this poem is really talking about—whether it's the whole nature of art, or the place of women in society, or something else. What do you think?

What happens after Ulysses finally makes it home? He realizes the truth behind that cliché—it's all in the journey, not the destination. What do you make of Tennyson's "Ulysses," given the Victorian preoccupation with improvement and progress?