INDEX
1. Victorian Age, Historical
Background (By Cristina Boix)
2. Science and Religion (By Marga Martí)
Sandra Gisbert
3. Alfred Lord Tenison (my task) Sandra Gisbert
4. Robert Browning (by Sandra Gisbert)
5. E.B Browning (By Xihong Liu)
6. G.M Hopkins (By Ana Such) Sandra Gisbert
7. Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood (By Neu Zorrilla and Ana Such)
8.
Bibliography Sandra Gisbert
ALFRED LORD TENNYSON (my task)
A Brief Biography
Sir Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron
Tennyson Alfred
Tennyson was born August 6th, 1809, at Somersby, Lincolnshire, fourth of twelve
children of George and Elizabeth (Fytche) Tennyson.
He was Poet
Laureate of the United Kingdom after William Wordsworth and is one of the most
popular English
poets.
He also had a lifelong
fear of mental illness, for several men in his family had a mild form of
epilepsy, which was then thought a shameful disease. His father and brother
Arthur made their cases worse by excessive drinking.
In 1827 Tennyson
escaped the troubled atmosphere of his home when he followed his two older brothers
to
The Tennyson brothers
became well known at
Arthur Hallam's was the
most important of these friendships. He and Tennyson knew each other only four
years, but their intense friendship had major influence on the poet. On a visit
to Somersby, Hallam met and later became engaged to Emily Tennyson, and the two
friends looked forward to a life-long companionship. Hallam's death from
illness in 1833 (he was only 22) shocked Tennyson profoundly, and his grief
lead to most of his best poetry, including In Memoriam , "The Passing of Arthur",
"Ulysses," and "Tithonus."
Since Tennyson was
always sensitive to criticism, the mixed reception of his 1832 Poems
hurt him greatly. Critics in those days delighted in the harshness of their
reviews: the Quarterly Review was known as the "Hang, draw, and
quarterly." John Wilson Croker's harsh criticisms of some of the poems in
our anthology kept Tennyson from publishing again for another nine years.
Late in the 1830s
Tennyson grew concerned about his mental health and visited a sanitarium run by
Dr. Matthew Allen, with whom he later invested his inheritance (his grandfather
had died in 1835) and some of his family's money.
The success of his 1842
Poems made Tennyson a popular poet, and in 1845 he received a Civil List
(government) pension of £200 a year, which helped relieve his financial
difficulties; the success of "The Princess" and In Memoriam
and his appointment in 1850 as Poet Laureate finally established him as the
most popular poet of the Victorian era.
By now Tennyson, only 41, had
written some of his greatest poetry, but he continued to write and to gain in
popularity. In 1853, as the Tennysons were moving into their new house on the
This is one of Tennyson's most famous works. It is
a series of narrative poems based entirely on King Arthur
and the Arthurian tales, as thematically suggested by Sir Thomas
Malory's earlier tales on the legendary king. The work was dedicated to
Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. During his career, Lord Tennyson
attempted drama,
but his plays enjoyed little success even in his lifetime.
Tennyson suffered from
extreme short-sightedness -- without a monocle he could not even see to eat --
which gave him considerable difficulty writing and reading, and this disability
in part accounts for his manner of creating poetry: Tennyson composed much of
his poetry in his head, occasionally working on individual poems for many
years.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
died on
After that we are going
to analyse a poem which has references on the main ideas of Romanticism.
"The Kraken" (1830)
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
“The Kraken” first
appeared in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson.
“The Kraken” is one of
Tennyson's few good sonnets, even though it has fifteen lines. In terms of
rhyme scheme, the ABABCDDCEFEAAFE pattern suggests that it is modelled on the
Petrarchian (Italian) rather than the Shakespearean (English) form of three
quatrains and a concluding couplet.
The sestet has been
extended to return to the dominant words and rhymes of the opening four lines.
The poem draws its
images from the Norse legend of a gigantic sea-monster that supposedly preyed
upon shipping off the coast of
The connection of
Tennyson's sea-best to the biblical end of time suggests the influence of John
Milton's Paradise Lost.
Tennyson's poem neatly
combines the Bible, literature, mythology, and natural history, balancing the
theories of science with the traditions of Christian faith.
Seeing this poem we can see
how he uses the reaction against the rationalization of nature, in art and
literature it stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience,
placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the
experience in confronting the sublimity of nature.
Some examples of nature are
words as “thunders” (line 1), “sea”(line 2), “sunlights”(line4) or
“light”(line7).
Another examples are
referring to religiosity as when at the end of the poem the authors mentions
“then once by man and angels to be seen, / inroaring he shall rise and on the
surface die” (line 14 / 15)
During the reading of
the poem we can make an image of an animal as an octopus but seeing in a deeper
part of the poem we can observe that the author is showing us the natural
elements that involved the situation as the sea, the shadow, the weather, or
the animal’s form. But the other important aspect is the vision of the animal
as the devil, a big monster which causes horror.