Alfred Lord Tennyson: la vita e il pensiero

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Life

He was the 4th son in a family of 12 children. His father was a man of considerable learning, who joined the clergy even if he disliked this profession. His sense of dissatisfaction led him to drunkenness. He was nevertheless able to act as his sons’ tutor in classical and modern languages, to prepare them for entering the university.

• The most important friendship was with Arthur Hallam. His sudden death was a tragedy to Tennyson. He wrote a long elegy, “In Memoriam” for him and in a lot of his poems emerges the tribute of this friendship.
• With “In Memoriam” he became the favourite poet of the queen. She said “Next to the Bible, “In Memoriam” is my comfort”.
• 1850: he became poet laureate in succession to Wordsworth.
• Troubles with Emily Sellwood, the woman he loved but could not marry until 1850 because of poverty.
• After he started to gain from his poetry, he bought a house in the country, which he enjoyed a lot. He became also a “character” for the way he acted and dressed. A photographer, Julia Cameron, who took portraits of him, called him “the most beautiful old man on earth”.

Thought

• The technological changes made by Victorian inventors fascinated him, sometimes giving him an exultant assurance of human progress. At other times the horror of industrialism, the persistence of barbarity and bloodshed (=spargimenti di sangue), and the greed (=avidità) of the newly rich destroyed his hopes that humanity was evolving upwards.
• He was essentially a poet of the countryside, a man whose being was conditioned by the recurring rhythms of rural rather than urban life. So many of his poems are about the past, not about the present or the future. Tennyson said that “the words far far away had always a strange charm” for him, even in his childhood. He was haunted by what he called “the passion of the past”. The past became his great time, whether it be his own past, his country past or the past of the world itself.

 →Past = la morte nella vita nostalgia + dolcezza (come baci che sono ancora vivi nei nostri ricordi)

 “Locksley Hall”: He refers to contemporary society. He expresses the division between accepting this process and the sense of nostalgia for what is past. At the end he seems to accept the world has changed.

 Ulysses represents the effort to go on despite the nostalgia!

• →Fluctuation of moods: we can see it especially in “In Memoriam”. From despair (for → →the death of his friend) we pass to doubt finally: hope (renewed faith)

In the poem “The two voices” we see: 1) the poetic