Alfred Tennyson: Poet of Empire, Loss and the Victorian Age

Alfred Tennyson became more than the most celebrated poet of Victorian Britain. He became one of the voices through which an age understood grief, faith, war, empire, duty and national identity.From an unsettled childhood in rural Lincolnshire and the devastating death of his closest friend Arthur Hallam, Tennyson rose to become Poet Laureate, confidant of Queen Victoria and eventually a peer of the realm. His career produced some of the nineteenth century's most enduring poetry, including In Memoriam, Ulysses, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Idylls of the King and Crossing the Bar.Yet behind the public image of the bearded Victorian sage was a man troubled by criticism, financial insecurity, religious doubt, bereavement and the pressures of fame. His poetry engaged with a Britain transformed by industrialisation, scientific discovery, political reform and imperial expansion while repeatedly asking whether individual lives, institutions and even great nations could survive the forces of change.Alfred Tennyson: Poet of Empire, Loss and the Victorian Age traces the life, work and cultural power of a writer whose words helped define Victorian Britain and whose arguments with grief, belief and mortality continue long after the world that created him disappeared.