Alfred Tennyson
From Philosopedia
Tennyson, Alfred [1st Baron Tennyson] (6 August 1809 - 6 October 1892)
The first Lord Tennyson, and the most famous English poet of the Victorian age, was a profound spokesman for the ideas and values of his times. He once wrote,
- It is inconceivable that the whole universe was merely created for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate son.
He was the son of an intelligent but unstable clergyman in Lincolnshire. In 1850, Tennyson became poet laureate, and in 1853 he was made a peer. He had not married until 1850, the stated reason for the delay being his poverty that was caused by the disinheritance of the Somersby Tennysons in favor of his socially ambitious uncle Charles Tennyson. R. B. Martin, however, suggested in Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980) that Alfred feared the “black blood” of the Tennysons, a notoriously melancholic and unstable family, and suspected that he, like his father, suffered from epilepsy.
Although expressions of love between men and androgynous characters are found in his early poetry, Tennyson was heterosexual, had many unrequited romantic attachments to women during his twenties and thirties, and in his forties married Emily Sellwood, with whom he later had two children.
"In Memoriam,” written for his beloved friend Henry Hallam portrays a chaste male love. So does his “Mort d’Arthur” (1842), in which the great medieval king is attended by a loving attendant Sir Bedivere, in whose arms he dies. Also, so does The Holy Grail (1869), in which King Arthur meets a “beautiful” Sir Galahad and in which Sir Percivale fails to find the Grail but does not fall into the clutches of the monk with whom he ends, one who tries unsuccessfully, in the words of the University of California’s Donald E. Hall, “to elicit an admission of love from Percivale.”
Tennyson was a member of the Metaphysical Society, at which one of his long poems on pantheism was delivered. Joseph McCabe wrote that Tennyson was severely condemned by British freethinkers for his Promise of May and his use of theistic language, leading preachers to quote him as an orthodox Christian. “But there is ample evidence,” adds McCabe, “that he was a pantheist and skeptical about a future life.
Allingham who knew him well so testifies in his Diary, and his son reluctantly confirms this in his biography of his father. Dr. Jowett says the same, and the cautious trimmer Masterman, who wrote a book on his religion, has to admit it. Tennyson received the ‘communion’ shortly before he died, but his son admits that he protested that he did not take in the Church sense, and a few days later he said of the pantheist Giordano Bruno, ‘His view of God is in some ways mine.’ Bruno, of course, had been burned at the stake for heresy.”
Tennyson was buried in Westminster Abbey, and a biography by his son Hallam appeared in 1897.
(See entry for Joseph Warren Beach.)
