Although described by some critics as overly sentimental, his poems ultimately proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

was written to commemorate his friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and student at Trinity College, Cambridge, after he died of a stroke at the age of 22.

A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplace in the English language, including "Nature, red in tooth and claw" ("In Memoriam A.H.H.

He raised a large family and "was a man of superior abilities and varied attainments, who tried his hand with fair success in architecture, painting, music, and poetry.

He was comfortably well off for a country clergyman, and his shrewd money management enabled the family to spend summers at Mablethorpe and Skegness on the eastern coast of England".

George Clayton Tennyson was elder son of attorney and MP George Tennyson (1749/50-1835), JP, DL, of Bayons Manor and Usselby Hall, who had also inherited the estates of his mother's family, the Claytons, and married Mary, daughter and heiress of John Turner, of Caistor, Lincolnshire.

[15][16] Reportedly, "it was thought to be no slight honour for a young man of twenty to win the chancellor's gold medal".

Although decried by some critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

[18] Tennyson and his family were allowed to stay in the rectory for some time, but later moved to Beech Hill Park, High Beach, deep within Epping Forest, Essex, about 1837.

Tennyson's son recalled: "there was a pond in the park on which in winter my father might be seen skating, sailing about on the ice in his long blue cloak.

[18] Tennyson befriended a Dr Allen, who ran a nearby asylum whose patients then included the poet John Clare.

In 1850, after William Wordsworth's death and Samuel Rogers' refusal, Tennyson was appointed to the position of Poet Laureate; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Leigh Hunt had also been considered.

Tennyson fulfilled the requirements of this position, such as by authoring a poem of greeting to Princess Alexandra of Denmark when she arrived in Britain to marry the future King Edward VII.

[26] Virginia Woolf wrote a play called Freshwater, showing Tennyson as host to his friends Julia Margaret Cameron and G. F.

[28] Colonel George Edward Gouraud, Thomas Edison's European agent, made sound recordings of Tennyson reading his own poetry, late in his life.

They include recordings of "The Charge of the Light Brigade", and excerpts from "The splendour falls" (from The Princess), "Come into the garden" (from Maud), "Ask me no more", "Ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington" and "Lancelot and Elaine".

In "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After", Tennyson wrote: "Christian love among the churches look'd the twin of heathen hate."

In his play, Becket, he wrote: "We are self-uncertain creatures, and we may, Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites and private hates with our defence of Heaven".

[37] The two met twice, first in April 1862, when Victoria wrote in her diary, "very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair & a beard, oddly dressed, but there is no affectation about him.

The influence of John Keats and other Romantic poets published before and during his childhood is evident from the richness of his imagery and descriptive writing.

The language of "I come from haunts of coot and hern" lilts and ripples like the brook in the poem and the last two lines of "Come down O maid from yonder mountain height" illustrate his telling combination of onomatopoeia, alliteration, and assonance: The moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmuring of innumerable bees.

Tennyson was a craftsman who polished and revised his manuscripts extensively, to the point where his efforts at self-editing were described by his contemporary Robert Browning as "insane", symptomatic of "mental infirmity".

[41] His complex compositional practice and frequent redrafting also demonstrates a dynamic relationship between images and words, as can be seen in the many notebooks he worked in.

He also reflects a concern common among Victorian writers in being troubled by the conflict between religious faith and expanding scientific knowledge.

[46] T. S. Eliot famously described Tennyson as "the saddest of all English poets", whose technical mastery of verse and language provided a "surface" to his poetry's "depths, to the abyss of sorrow".

In 1848, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt made a list of "Immortals", artistic heroes whom they admired, especially from literature, notably including Keats and Tennyson, whose work would form subjects for PRB paintings.

A list of works by Tennyson follows:[51][52] Michael William Balfe's setting of "Come Into the Garden, Maud" was a popular success in 1857, as sung by the celebrated tenor Sims Reeves.

[68] Charles Villiers Stanford set "Crossing the Bar" for high voice and piano in April 1880, a year after the poem has been first published.

"The splendour falls on castle walls" (also from The Princess), has been set by many composers, including Arnold Bax, Benjamin Britten, Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, Gustav Holst, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Charles Wood.

[71] Tennyson's "Ulysses" was quoted in the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, with the character M (played by actress Judi Dench) reciting the poem.