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A Study Of The Life And Career Of Lord Alfred Tennyson and Selected Criticisms of His Works

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A Study Of The Life And Career Of Lord Alfred Tennyson
And Selected Criticism Of His Works


Whether a person likes or dislikes the works of Lord Alfred Tennyson, most would agree that he was one of the most influential writers of his time period.
Tennyson grew up in a wealthy family never wanting for anything. English author often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850; he was appointed by Queen
Victoria and served 42 years. Tennyson's works were melancholic, and reflected the moral and intellectual values of his time, which made them especially vulnerable for later critic.
Alfred, Lord …show more content…

Tennyson's life was then uneventful. In London he was a regular guest of the literary and artistic salon of Mrs Prinsep at Little Holland House. During these later years he produced some of his best poems.
Among Tennyson's major poetic achievements is the elegy mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, In Memoriam (1850). The personal sorrow led the poet to explore his thoughts on faith, immortality, and the meaning of loss: "O life as futile, then, as frail! / O for thy voice to soothe and bless! / What hope of answer, or redress? / Behind the veil, behind the veil." Among its other passages is a symbolic voyage ending in a vision of Hallam as the poet's muse. Some critics have seen in the work ideas, that anticipated Darwin's theory of natural selection.
"Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation's final law - / Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek'd against his creed - ", the poet wrote.
He was born in the same year as Darwin, but his view about natural history, however, was based on catastrophe theory, not evolution. The patriotic poem
'Charge of the Light Brigade', published in MAUD (1855), is one of Tennyson's best known works, although first Maud was found obscure or morbid by critics ranging from George Eliot to Gladstone. Later the poem about the Light Brigade inspired Michael Curtiz's film from 1936,

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