Tennyson: To Strive, to Seek, to Find

As Newcastle University emeritus professor Batchelor (The Life of Joseph Conrad) notes in his solid biography of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1850 marked a turning point in the poet’s life. It was the year the handsome, talented, but troubled young man from Lincolnshire published In Memoriam, married his sweetheart, Emily, and became Queen Victoria’s poet laureate. Batchelor’s detailed exploration of the poet’s life gains more verve at this point, too, though the first half establishes themes that reverberate throughout, including Tennyson’s bouts of depression and financial anxiety. Tennyson’s intense friendship with Cambridge classmate Arthur Hallam looms large, and Hallam’s early and untimely death in 1833 would haunt and inspired the majestic In Memoriam. Batchelor adequately contextualizes Tennyson’s works in relation to his life and provides analysis that would be accessible to the reader already familiar with the poems. However, he is less successful in capturing and integrating details of the Victorian era, despite his desire to show his eccentric subject to be “more centrally Victorian than previous biographies have displayed.” 16 pages of b&w photos. (Dec.)