Assignment 104

     Assignment Paper 104 

    This blog task is a part of assignment of paper

      104: Literature of the Victorians.

    ■ personal Information:

   Name: Shatakshi Sarvaiya

    Batch: M.A Sem 1 (2024-26)

    Enrollment number: 5108240030

    E-mail Address: 

     shatakshisarvaiya9@gmail.com

   Roll number: 28

   ■ Assignment Details:

  Topic: Alfred Tennyson his Biography and as a Poet

   paper & Subject code: paper 104: Literature of victorians

   Submitted to: SMT. Department of English, Bhavnagar

   Date of Submission: 20 November,2024

   ■ Table of Contens:

  ✴ Introduction ( Alferd Tennyson)

   ✴ Work

   ✴ Theme 

   ✴ Characteristics

  ■ Introduction:

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (born August 6, 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, England—died October 6, 1892, Aldworth, Surrey) was an English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884.

Tennyson was the fourth of 12 children, born into an old Lincolnshire family, his father a rector. Alfred, with two of his brothers, Frederick and Charles, was sent in 1815 to Louth grammar school—where he was unhappy. He left in 1820, but, though home conditions were difficult, his father managed to give him a wide literary education. Alfred was precocious, and before his teens he had composed in the styles of Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, and John Milton. To his youth also belongs The Devil and the Lady (a collection of previously unpublished poems published posthumously in 1930), which shows an astonishing understanding of Elizabethan dramatAt the lonely rectory in Somersby the children were thrown upon their own resources. All writers on Tennyson emphasize the influence of the Lincolnshire countryside on his poetry: the plain, the sea about his home, “the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea,” and “the waste enormous marsh.”

In 1824 the health of Tennyson’s father began to break down, and he took refuge in drink. Alfred, though depressed by unhappiness at home, continued to write, collaborating with Frederick and Charles in Poems by Two Brothers (1826; dated 1827). His contributions (more than half the volume) are mostly in fashionable styles of the day.

In 1827 Alfred and Charles joined Frederick at Trinity College, Cambridge. There Alfred made friends with Arthur Hallam, the gifted son of the historian Henry Hallam. This was the deepest friendship of Tennyson’s life. The friends became members of the Apostles, an exclusive undergraduate club of earnest intellectual interests. Tennyson’s reputation as a poet increased at Cambridge. In 1829 he won the chancellor’s gold medal with a poem called Timbuctoo. In 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical was published; and in the same year Tennyson, Hallam, and other Apostles went to Spain to help in the unsuccessful revolution against Ferdinand VII. In the meantime, Hallam had become attached to Tennyson’s sister Emily but was forbidden by her father to correspond with her for a year.

In 1831 Tennyson’s father died. Alfred’s misery was increased by his grandfather’s discovery of his father’s debts. He left Cambridge without taking a degree, and his grandfather made financial arrangements for the family. In the same year, Hallam published a eulogistic article on Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in The Englishman’s Magazine. He went to Somersby in 1832 as the accepted suitor of Emily.

In 1832 Tennyson published another volume of his poems (dated 1833), including “The Lotos-Eaters,” “The Palace of Art,” and “The Lady of Shalott.” Among them was a satirical epigram on the critic Christopher North (pseudonym of the Scottish writer John Wilson), who had attacked Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in Blackwood’s Magazine. Tennyson’s sally prompted a scathing attack on his new volume in the Quarterly Review. The attacks distressed Tennyson, but he continued to revise his old poems and compose new ones.

In 1833 Hallam’s engagement was recognized by his family, but while on a visit to Vienna in September he died suddenly. The shock to Tennyson was severe. It came at a depressing time; three of his brothers, Edward, Charles, and Septimus, were suffering from mental illness, and the bad reception of his own work added to the gloom. Yet it was in this period that he wrote some of his most characteristic work: “The Two Voices” (of which the original title, significantly, was “Thoughts of a Suicide”), “Ulysses,” “St. Simeon Stylites,” and, probably, the first draft of “Morte d’Arthur.” To this period also belong some of the poems that became constituent parts of In Memoriam, celebrating Hallam’s death, and lyrics later worked into Maud.

In May 1836 his brother Charles married Louisa Sellwood of Horncastle, and at the wedding Alfred fell in love with her sister Emily. For some years the lovers corresponded, but Emily’s father disapproved of Tennyson because of his bohemianism, addiction to port and tobacco, and liberal religious views; and in 1840 he forbade the correspondence. Meanwhile the Tennysons had left Somersby and were living a rather wandering life nearer London. It was in this period that Tennyson made friends with many famous men, including the politician William Ewart Gladstone, the historian Thomas Carlyle, and the poet Walter Savage Landor.

■ Work (Tennyson):

In 1842 Tennyson published Poems, in two volumes, one containing a revised selection from the volumes of 1830 and 1832, the other, new poems. The new poems included “Morte d’Arthur,” “The Two Voices,” “Locksley Hall,” and “The Vision of Sin” and other poems that reveal a strange naïveté, such as “The May Queen,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” and “The Lord of Burleigh.” The new volume was not on the whole well received. But the grant to him at this time, by the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, of a pension of £200 helped to alleviate his financial worries. In 1847 he published his first long poem, The Princess, a singular anti-feminist fantasia.

The year 1850 marked a turning point. Tennyson resumed his correspondence with Emily Sellwood, and their engagement was renewed and followed by marriage. Meanwhile, Edward Moxon offered to publish the elegies on Hallam that Tennyson had been composing over the years. They appeared, at first anonymously, as In Memoriam (1850), which had a great success with both reviewers and the public, won him the friendship of Queen Victoria, and helped bring about, in the same year, his appointment as poet laureate.

In Memoriam is a vast poem of 131 sections of varying length, with a prologue and epilogue. Inspired by the grief Tennyson felt at the untimely death of his friend Hallam, the poem touches on many intellectual issues of the Victorian Age as the author searches for the meaning of life and death and tries to come to terms with his sense of loss. Most notably, In Memoriam reflects the struggle to reconcile traditional religious faith and belief in immortality with the emerging theories of evolution and modern geology. The verses show the development over three years of the poet’s acceptance and understanding of his friend’s death and conclude with an epilogue, a happy marriage song on the occasion of the wedding of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia.

After his marriage, which was happy, Tennyson’s life became more secure and outwardly uneventful. There were two sons: Hallam and Lionel. The times of wandering and unsettlement ended in 1853, when the Tennysons took a house, Farringford, in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson was to spend most of the rest of his life there and at Aldworth (near Haslemere, Surrey).

Tennyson’s position as the national poet was confirmed by his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852)—though some critics at first thought it disappointing—and the famous poem on the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, published in 1855 in Maud and Other Poems. Maud itself, a strange and turbulent “monodrama,” provoked a storm of protest; many of the poet’s admirers were shocked by the morbidity, hysteria, and bellicosity of the hero. Yet Maud was Tennyson’s favourite among his poems.

A project that Tennyson had long considered at last issued in Idylls of the King (1859), a series of 12 connected poems broadly surveying the legend of King Arthur from his falling in love with Guinevere to the ultimate ruin of his kingdom. The poems concentrate on the introduction of evil to Camelot because of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, and on the consequent fading of the hope that had at first infused the Round Table fellowship. Idylls of the King had an immediate success, and Tennyson, who loathed publicity, had now acquired a sometimes embarrassing public fame. The Enoch Arden volume of 1864 perhaps represents the peak of his popularity. New Arthurian Idylls were published in The Holy Grail, and Other Poems in 1869 (dated 1870). These were again well received, though some readers were beginning to show discomfort at the “Victorian” moral atmosphere that Tennyson had introduced into his source material from Sir Thomas Malory.

In 1874 Tennyson decided to try his hand at poetic drama. Queen Mary appeared in 1875, and an abridged version was produced at the Lyceum in 1876 with only moderate success. It was followed by Harold (1876; dated 1877), Becket (not published in full until 1884), and the “village tragedy” The Promise of May, which proved a failure at the Globe in November 1882. This play—his only prose work—shows Tennyson’s growing despondency and resentment at the religious, moral, and political tendencies of the age. He had already caused some sensation by publishing a poem called “Despair” in The Nineteenth Century (November 1881). A more positive indication of Tennyson’s later beliefs appears in “The Ancient Sage,” published in Tiresias and Other Poems (1885). Here the poet records his intimations of a life before and beyond this life.

Tennyson accepted a peerage (after some hesitation) in 1884. In 1886 he published a new volume containing “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” consisting mainly of imprecations against modern decadence and liberalism and a retraction of the earlier poem’s belief in inevitable human progress.

In 1889 Tennyson wrote the famous short poem “Crossing the Bar,” during the crossing to the Isle of Wight. In the same year he published Demeter and Other Poems, which contains the charming retrospective “To Mary Boyle,” “The Progress of Spring,” a fine lyric written much earlier and rediscovered, and “Merlin and the Gleam,” an allegorical summing-up of his poetic career. In 1892 his play The Foresters was successfully produced in New York City. Despite ill health, he was able to correct the proofs of his last volume, The Death of Oenone, Akbar’s Dream, and Other Poems (1892).

■ Theme of Tennyson's poem: 

✴Death:

The great poets commonly take up the subject of death in their works, but it is rare to see a great poet treat death in such a sustained and deeply personal way as Tennyson does. Many of his greatest works were written in the aftermath of the death of his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. “Ulysses” is about the great hero searching for life in spite of old age and coming death, and “Tithonus” concerns the weariness of life on earth when all one wants to do is fade into the earth and no longer linger on. “The Two Voices” is a debate about whether or not to commit suicide. “In Memoriam” is the poet’s lengthy meditation on his profound grief and his desire to know what happens after death as well as his occasional musing that he wishes to die and join his friend. As “In Memoriam” proceeds, however, Tennyson appears to accept the reality of death in the natural cycle of life and to understand that he can still find pleasure on earth until his time comes. He looks forward to his reunion with Hallam and believes that his friend’s death occasioned his transcendence to a higher spiritual state. The acceptance of death is manifested in one of his last works, “Crossing the Bar,” in which he looks upon his passage from life to death as a meaningful and happy occasion.

✴ Nature:

Nature plays many roles in Tennyson’s poetry. Occasionally she is beguiling and sensuous, as in “The Lotos-Eaters.” In that poem the men sojourning on the isle are entranced by their natural surroundings and do not want to return to their normal lives. Nature is also an ever-present reminder of the cycle of life from birth to death; existing outside of that cycle can bring grief and separation from one’s mortal humanity, for better or for worse. Occasionally Nature is a reminder of the vitality of life and existence; other times Nature is used as a metaphor for death (see “Break, break, break” for the former and “Crossing the Bar” for the latter). Finally, Nature can also be chaotic, hostile, and indifferent to Man. The casual way she discards species and wreaks havoc leads the poet to conclude that life might be meaningless.

✴Grief:

Grief permeates Tennyson’s poetry and was a major feature of Tennyson’s emotional life. He endured the deaths of his parents, the ensuing mental illness and addictions of many of his family members and, as a kind of muse, the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam. His poems are frank discussions of despair and the trouble of using words sufficient to express it, and he demonstrates the significance of writing poetry in the face of sorrow and loss. In some of the poems his grief is overwhelming, and he does not know if he wants to continue living. In others he finds ways to manage his grief, coming to accept that sorrow may always be a part of one’s life, while acknowledging other things in life inspire happiness and hope.

✵Artistic Isolation:

Tennyson struggled with the question of whether great art had to be produced in artistic isolation or if engagement with the world was acceptable and would not cloud artistic vision. In “The Lady of Shalott” he examines this question. Her island is a safe haven for artists, and she creates her magic web in contentment. However, she is not actually creating reality, since she only sees things reflected in the mirror, and she eventually tires of her estrangement from life and love. When she chooses to look out the window and leave her tower, thus breaking the rule in the curse, she chooses to embrace a full and passionate life. However, this life is actually death, and her art is destroyed as well. The poem suggests that the end of artistic isolation brings a loss of creativity and artistic power.

✴Spirituality:

Tennyson adhered to a Christian faith that can most vividly be seen in “In Memoriam,” but he was not wary of expressing his difficulties with that faith and religious belief, particularly in the wake of the death of Hallam. He engages with the scientific findings of the Victorian era, wondering whether Nature is truly indifferent to Man and whether death only brings obliteration of the soul. He finds it difficult to be optimistic and positive that he will be reunited with Hallam after death and that there is any purpose in living. The poet’s lapses in faith, however, are reconciled by the end of the poem. He moves from doubt to acceptance, certain once more that the spirit is not gone after death but lives on and progresses to a higher state. He believes that God does have a plan for human beings and that one’s presence on earth is not accidental or unheeded.

✴Time:

Many of Tennyson’s works reflect his working through the implications of time. Growing old and lingering on are laborious and enervating in poems like “Tithonus” and “The Two Voices,” while in “Ulysses” the title character wants to keep adventuring as long as he can. Life on earth can be very sad because one is separated from loved ones who have died and because knowledge is limited. Time is also complicated by the tensions between science and religion; science reveals that time stretches on for a very long time, and religion asserts but does not prove what happens after death. Generally the poet’s reflection is that life is fleeting and short, wasted if one dwells merely in sadness or in hope, and worth savoring while it lasts.

✴ Courage:

Many of Tennyson’s greatest poems feature individuals displaying great courage, especially under duress. Courage is a universally admired virtue, but during the Victorian age and for the British in particular, it was extremely important. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” features the “noble” six hundred soldiers who rush into a battle even though they know they will probably perish; their courage and willingness to follow orders are exemplary. Similarly, Tennyson creates a highly sympathetic character in Princess Ida from “The Princess: A Medley.” She is firmly committed to her vision and does not yield to those who wish to dissuade her from her noble goal of securing gender equality. In “Morte d’Arthur,” one of the most heroic men in legendary history, King Arthur, is depicted demonstrating his courage not in the heat of battle but in his willingness to face death; much like Ulysses. Courage is perhaps the greatest Tennysonian virtue.

■ Characteristics of Tennyson poetry:

Characteristics of Alfred Lord Tennyson Poetry | Best Victorian Poet

hencecharacteristics that support the Victorian age are there in his poetry. One of the bestreasons which built the personality of Tennyson as a poet was his dramaticmonologues. In the Victorian era, there was much development in every field of life;mainly in music, art and literature. Poetry that was written in that era rejected the idea of romanticism. It became highly philosophical; therefore, most of the poetry representsphilosophical ideas. In his poetry, Lord Tennyson talks about the past, especially aboutthe Greeks; therefore, there is rebirth of Greek myths in his poems. He writesintellectual poems with modern philosophy along with a blend of philosophical ideas

To discuss the characteristics of Tennyson’s poetry, his poetry reflected his notion of thoughts. Tennyson wanted to escape the harsh reality with which he was not content about. So, he took the world of imagination like the romantic writers to pass an escape whilst giving a message indeed.

✴Imagination in his poetry:

While moving on to the characteristics of Tennyson’s poetry, he very well portrayed his imagination into words which makes us feel that image right in our eyes. Whereas creating imagery while reading his poems. In Tithonus, the way dawn falls, the arrival of goddess aurora makes us visualize how the darkness falls off and light of dawn gleams in shaking off the darkness.

The imaginative land of lotus eaters, when we go through the poem, we are bound to see a land behind the curtains of our eyes where the streams flow on drowsily, moon above the valley in an afternoon and the red gleams of the west as if it’s the time of sunset. The image we can visualize feels so real due to the merging of mood and nature as if we can feel those weary sailors who once longed to reach their fatherland. 

✴Style:

Tennyson uses Dramatic monologue in some of his poems unlike Browning who is the king of it. A poem written in dramatic monologue means the imagined speaker addresses a silent listener which is not the reader. As if a silent listener is hearing it all but not responding which would make it seem conversational. The ‘story’ or what happens is a movement in thought and emotion and it is not presented in a direct narration. In Tithonus, Goddess Aurora is the silent listener of Tithonus. Although Tennyson somewhat made use of this method, his poetry had allusions or was based on classical mythology. Thus making it the leading characteristics of Tennyson’s poetry.

✴Myth:

Tennyson was not against the revolution of scientific discoveries that were taking place. Rather, how it drew people apart from each other and as well as from spirituality. The more people were getting towards advancement, the more it drew them apart from their creator and hence making humans forget their boundaries. He very well tried to portray his ideas through the use of myth. Tithonus is like a complete fairytale where a goddess and a human can get married. The reference of Goddess of dawn has been taken from ancient Greek. The concept of providing boon to a human such as immortality is an element of myth. 

✴Greek Mythology:

Classical legendary figures and myths rule in Tennyson’s poetry. He brings mythical elements which feels like fairytale, showing his glory for past, being nostalgic for that period; the classic. 

For instance, in The Lotus Eaters

” To muse and brood and live again in memory”

Tennyson adds elements of nostalgia as he himself glorified the past, to go back to classic, something old which is to cherish. 

Even Tithonus in Tithonus laments by remembering his past that how glorified he was that Aurora chose her.

” Alas! For this gray shadow, once a man—

So glorious in his beauty and thy choice”

He even named a complete poem with a classical legend, Ulysses, Odysseus of Homer’s Iliad. In the poem we can figure the mention of Achilles, the great warrior of Troy and in Tithonus, the mythical God Apollo’s song.

We even have this classical figure in another poem The Lotus eaters, where Ulysses and his companion sailors, who long to get back to their land and reaches a shore. Such stories are famous myths which we often grew up hearing. Like fairytale we are introduced to a strange land which can only exist in our imagination. 

How astonishing it might be for the Victorian people to know that a man felt idle being titled as a king! Ulysses wanted to leave his life of luxury in thirst for adventure, particularly to widen his depth of life and knowledge then sitting idle. Imagine the Victorian or Modern people in that situation. Would they ever leave the life of opulence in order to gain something providing inner passion? Rather they run behind the materialistic world, earning more and more wealth. Tennyson sort of criticized the Victorian people through his work.

✴Symbols:

Since ages writers have been using symbols to incarnate a meaning through something else. Certainly it is a characteristic of Tennyson’s poetry as well. 

The lotos plant in The Lotos-eaters is a symbol of escape from the world of responsibility. Just as the God who are careless of mankind. It signifies that apart from this hasty life one needs rest as well as one day we are to die.

Tithonus trying to attain a virtue of God symbolizes that man should not try to cross his boundaries of being a human or else the outcome won’t be fruitful and can lead to adverse. 

Sea/water serves as both the means of a character’s imprisonment and the opportunity for their freedom. Imprisonment that the sailors

■ Conclusions: 

Alfred Lord Tennyson in Biography Literaria in about Tennyson like,born,dide, education all this things and Alfred Tennyson major works and there are seven themes . Tennyson five characters about life and work.                     In a nutshell.

■ My Reference are:

Wallace, William, and Susie Steinbach. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Poet, Poems, Victorian.” Britannica, 25 October 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-Lord-Tennyson/Major-literary-work. Accessed 19 November 2024.

Tennyson, Alfred. “Tennyson's Poems Themes.” GradeSaver, 22 December 2023, https://www.gradesaver.com/tennysons-poems/study-guide/themes. Accessed 19 November 2024.

“Characteristics of Tennyson's Period | PDF | Poetry | Realism (Arts).” Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/document/567293312/Characteristics-of-Tennyson-s-period. Accessed 19 November 2024.

Thank you........