Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) was the preeminent poet of the Victorian era and England's Poet Laureate for forty-two years, succeeding William Wordsworth in 1850. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined the elite Cambridge Apostles society, Tennyson was devastated by the sudden death of his closest companion, Arthur Henry Hallam, in 1833.

Tennyson poured his seventeen years of grief into In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), an elegiac masterpiece that captured the Victorian struggle between Christian faith, evolutionary biology ('Nature, red in tooth and claw'), and mortality. His patriotic and heroic poems, including 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', 'Ulysses' ('To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'), and his Arthurian epic Idylls of the King, resonated so powerfully that Queen Victoria sought his counsel in her bereavement.