Alfred Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…
“Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all, though his blank verse was poor.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow
In the quiet churchyard of St. Giles' Church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, lies a simple grave that has drawn literary pilgrims for centuries. Here rests Thomas Gray (1716-1771), a man whose single greatest poem transformed him from an obscure Cambridge scholar into one of the most quoted poets in the English language. Yet Gray himself was a study in contradictions—a reluctant celebrity who shunned fame, a brillia…
“The language of the age is never the language of poetry.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
