Alfred, Lord Tennyson Biography

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was England’s Poet Laureate from 1850 to 1892, and the author of the poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He wrote poems as a child and published his first important work in 1830, while still a student at Cambridge. His poem “Mariana” became popular, followed in 1832 by poems such as “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Lady of Shallott.” His elegy to a close friend, In Memoriam, was published in 1850, the same year Queen Victoria named him Poet Laureate (successor to William Wordsworth). A critical and popular success during his lifetime, Tennyson wrote skillfully crafted poems informed by the values of the Victorian age. He wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” shortly after a 1854 Crimean War incident in which British forces were slaughtered in a futile attack against superior Russian forces. The poem was hugely popular at the time, but tends to be sneered at by modern audiences for depicting blind loyalty as valor. His other famous works include Idylls of the King (1859-85), an epic based on the legend of King Arthur, and the poem “Crossing the Bar.”