ALFRED TENNYSON:1

Alfred Tennyson was born in Somersby, a village in Lincolnshire, near the east coast of England, and took up poetry at Cambridge. During the early 1830s, there was a death of good poetry, so there was unusual critical interest in the works of younger poets such as Elizabeth Barrett and Tennyson. Tennyson’s collections, the Poems Chiefly Lyrical of 1830 and the Proems of 1832 (dated 1833), were exactingly reviewed. He published the two volumes of Poems of 1842 with which critics and public alike were impressed. The grave b blank verse and heroic mood of “Ulysses and brilliant word pictures and moral idealism of “Morte d’ Arthur” pointed forward to the Idylls of the King.