Honestly, most people remember Alfred Lord Tennyson as that Victorian guy with the massive beard and the even bigger reputation. He was the Poet Laureate for decades. He was a rockstar before rockstars existed. But if you actually sit down and read the poetical works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, you realize he wasn't just some stuffy establishment figure. He was a man obsessed with grief, doubt, and the terrifying speed of scientific progress.
He lived through a time when the world was breaking apart. Darwin was rewriting biology. Geologists were proving the earth was way older than the Bible suggested. Tennyson felt all of that. He put that anxiety into rhythm. It’s why his lines still show up in movies like Skyfall or The Outsiders. He’s the poet of the "longing for what’s gone."
The ghost that haunts his best lines
You can't talk about Tennyson without talking about Arthur Henry Hallam. They were best friends at Cambridge. They were part of a secret society called the Apostles. Then, Hallam died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage at 22. It broke Tennyson.
He spent seventeen years—seventeen!—writing In Memoriam A.H.H. It’s a massive, sprawling exploration of loss. It’s not just "I’m sad my friend is dead." It’s "Is there a God? Does nature even care about us?" He famously wrote that nature was "red in tooth and claw." He said that before Darwin’s Origin of Species even hit the shelves. Tennyson was already processing the brutality of existence while everyone else was busy with tea parties.
In Memoriam isn't a straight line. It’s a circle. He moves from total despair to a kind of shaky, hard-won faith. It’s messy. It’s human. He uses a specific rhyme scheme—ABBA—to create a sense of being trapped in a thought. You think the stanza is moving forward, but the last line pulls you back to the start. It's genius. It mimics how grief actually feels.
Why Ulysses is basically a mid-life crisis anthem
Everyone knows the line: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." It’s on posters. It’s on Olympic monuments. But read the actual poem. Tennyson wrote Ulysses right after Hallam died. It’s not just a "let's go on an adventure" story.
It’s about a man who is bored out of his mind. Ulysses is back from the Trojan War. He’s home. He’s a king. And he hates it. He calls his people a "savage race." He wants to leave his son, Telemachus, to do the boring administrative work while he sails into the sunset to die.
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It’s dark.
It’s about the refusal to grow old gracefully. Tennyson was processing his own need to keep writing and living even when his world had collapsed. When you read the poetical works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, you see this tension everywhere. He loves the past, but he’s terrified of being stuck in it.
The weird, lush world of The Lady of Shalott
If you want to see Tennyson’s obsession with the visual, look at The Lady of Shalott. It’s basically a high-definition movie in verse.
- The "willows whiten, aspens quiver."
- The "mirror clear that hangs before her all the year."
- The "blue unclouded weather."
It’s about a woman cursed to only look at the world through a reflection. When she looks at the real world—specifically at Lancelot—the mirror cracks and she dies. Critics have argued about this for over a hundred years. Is it about the artist being isolated? Is it about Victorian women being trapped in the domestic sphere?
Maybe it’s just about the danger of reality. Tennyson was a master of the "vignette." He could paint a scene with words so vividly that Pre-Raphaelite painters spent the next fifty years trying to put his poems onto canvas. John William Waterhouse’s painting of the Lady in the boat is probably more famous than the poem itself now, which is a bit of a shame.
The Charge of the Light Brigade: Propaganda or Protest?
We all had to read this in school. "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward."
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Tennyson wrote it in a few minutes after reading a newspaper report about a disastrous cavalry charge in the Crimean War. A bunch of soldiers were sent to certain death because of a miscommunication by their commanders.
Some people think it’s a patriotic anthem. Others see it as a subtle middle finger to the incompetent generals who "blundered." Tennyson emphasizes the "blunder." He focuses on the soldiers’ bravery, sure, but he doesn't hide the fact that the whole thing was a slaughter. He used a dactylic meter—long-short-short—to mimic the sound of horses galloping. It’s visceral. You feel the hooves. You feel the doom.
Dealing with the "Victorian" of it all
Look, Tennyson can be a lot. He can be sentimental. He can be overly moralistic. In Idylls of the King, his massive retelling of King Arthur, he sometimes gets bogged down in Victorian ideas about purity and "manliness" that don't always age well.
But then he’ll drop a line like "authority forgets a dying king," and you realize he understood power better than most modern political commentators. He knew that everything fades. Even the biggest empires. Even the greatest poets.
He was terrified of being forgotten. Ironically, he became so popular that he was almost parody-proof. He was the first poet to become a multi-millionaire from his books. He lived in a house on the Isle of Wight where he had to build a secret bridge just to avoid the tourists who were trying to peek over his fence.
How to actually read him today
If you’re diving into the poetical works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, don't start with the 800-page "Complete Works." You'll get bored. Instead, try this:
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- Read "Tithonus" first. It’s about a man who asked for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. It’s haunting and short.
- Listen to it. Tennyson’s poetry is incredibly musical. He obsessed over "vowel music." Read it out loud. If you don't feel the rhythm in your chest, you're doing it wrong.
- Check out "The Lotos-Eaters." It’s the ultimate "I don't want to go to work today" poem. It’s lush, slow, and makes you want to lie down in a field and never get up.
- Skip the long stuff (initially). The Princess is long and weird. It’s about women’s education but involves a prince cross-dressing to sneak into a college. Save that for when you're a hardcore fan.
The legacy of the "Miserable Laureate"
Tennyson wasn't a happy man. He suffered from "the black blood of the Tennysons"—a family history of depression, alcoholism, and mental instability. His poetry was his therapy.
When you read his work, you're reading someone trying to hold themselves together. He used strict rhyme and perfect meter as a cage for his chaotic emotions. That’s why his work feels so tense. It’s "measured language" covering up "unmeasured grief."
In the 20th century, poets like T.S. Eliot tried to kill off Tennyson's reputation. They thought he was too pretty, too decorative. But even Eliot had to admit that Tennyson was a master of the English language. No one else could make words sound like music quite like him.
Actionable steps for the modern reader
If you want to understand why Tennyson still matters, do these three things this week:
- Compare "Ulysses" to your own life. Are you "staying" in your comfortable routine, or are you looking for "that untravelled world"? The poem hits differently when you're facing a career change or a big move.
- Find a recording of Tennyson himself. Yes, he actually recorded "The Charge of the Light Brigade" on a wax cylinder in 1890. It sounds like a ghost shouting through a thunderstorm. It’s terrifying.
- Read the short lyrics in In Memoriam. Section 54 ("Oh yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill") is a masterclass in doubting your own optimism.
Tennyson isn't a museum piece. He’s a guy who was scared of the dark and used his pen to light a candle. Sometimes the candle flickers, and sometimes it burns the whole house down, but it’s never boring if you’re actually paying attention.
To get the most out of his work, look for a "Selected Poems" edited by Christopher Ricks. He’s the undisputed expert on Tennyson's drafts and nuances. You'll see how much Tennyson labored over every single syllable to make sure the "s" sounds didn't hiss too much or the "m" sounds weren't too heavy. It was a craft. It was a life's work. It's why we're still talking about him in 2026.