Tennyson – Interesting Literature

16 of the Best Tennyson Quotations

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The nineteenth-century poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) is probably the best-known poet of the Victorian era. His work was read by Queen Victoria, and he was the longest-serving Poet Laureate in the United Kingdom, holding the post from 1850 until his death in 1892.

Tennyson’s work is very quotable, and some of the phrases which appear in his work have entered common usage, as we’ll see below. Indeed, he’s been credited with introducing the phrase ‘airy-fairy’ into the language: now used to describe something whimsical and insubstantial, it was originally the description of an actual fairy, named Lilian, in an early poem with that title.

Who Said ‘Better to Have Loved and Lost than Never to Have Loved at All’?

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning and origin of a well-known proverb

‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ It’s become a proverb, and proverbs are, usually, authorless.

A Short Analysis of Tennyson’s ‘Dark House, by Which Once More I Stand’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Dark House, by Which Once More I Stand’ is one canto (the seventh) from a much longer work of poetry, In Memoriam A. H. H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92). The poem shows Tennyson revisiting the home of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, whose untimely death in 1833 inspired the poem. Before we proceed to offer an analysis of this section of the poem, here’s a reminder of the ‘Dark house’ canto.

The Invention of Free Verse: Tennyson’s ‘Semele’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses an early Tennyson poem

Who invented ‘free verse’? Walt Whitman (1819-92) often gets the credit, although his decision to write in free verse – unrhymed poetry without a regular metre or rhythm – may have been influenced by the Biblical Psalms. Before Whitman, the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart also wrote a wonderful poem which prefigures Whitman’s psalm-like free verse; rather pleasingly, a section of it is about his cat. What is certain is that Whitman’s influence ranged far and wide in nineteenth-century poetry, and he was read widely in France, where ‘free verse’ gave rise to vers libre, a kind of unrhymed poetry less exuberant and more staid than Whitman’s, but similarly untrammelled by rhyme or fixed patterns.

‘Now fades the last long streak of snow’: A Poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Now fades the last long streak of snow’: this canto, Canto CXV from Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s long elegy In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) – written in memory of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam – offers a bittersweet take on the arrival of spring. What grows in the speaker’s breast as spring comes into blossom is regret – regret that his dear friend is gone, that spring is a reminder that the world continues to turn and life carries on, but Tennyson’s friend does not return. One of the best poems in a great long poetic sequence.