Tiresias is a prophet whose prophecies no one wants to hear, and as such has become a character that is used by many poets…
In the first lines of Tennyson’s ‘Godiva’, it is made clear just how inspiring Tennyson found the railways of his time.…
On the way to Freshwater from Newport I pass a house called ‘Aubade’, it has always struck me as quite an odd name for a house…
Tennyson never completely translated the Iliad; however, he did try his hand at a couple of passages...…
We are most likely to associate Tennyson with long poems, like ‘In Memoriam’ and his short poems are all too often squeezed out by these longer works…
When the First World War began, it was Tennyson’s register of language that people, soldiers and the government turned to.…
Lionel Tennyson, grandson of Alfred, was a famous cricketer who captained Hampshire and England in the 1920s…
Magical realism as a genre title emerged in 1955, one hundred years after Tennyson was writing ...…
Tennyson, like many of the Victorians of the time, and indeed, many Americans to come, was preoccupied with looking West ... …
‘Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own’ writes Hazlitt in his essay ‘On Poetical Versatility’…
Edward Lear met the Tennysons through their mutual friend Franklin Lushington. Tennyson's sister was married to…
T.S. Eliot once described Tennyson as ‘the saddest of poets’, and we tend to think of him as an austere Victorian patriarch ...…
Writing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Tennyson’s poetry is about a countryside on the cusp of going into decline ...…
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, despite his wife’s delicate constitution and dislike of the habit, was a heavy smoker.…
Audrey Tennyson is one of the many women with a fascinating past overshadowed by that of her husband.…
Before the standardisation of English some of the most popular texts such as ‘Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight’ were written in dialect.…
One of the top most Google searched questions about Tennyson is ‘Was Tennyson a Romantic Poet?'…
If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess ...…
The second part of Kate Bush’s ‘The Hounds of Love’ album takes its title from the first poem of Tennyson’s ‘The Idylls of the King’,…
Every evening Alfred, Lord Tennyson, read the poetry that he was working on to his wife Emily…
Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites created characters so real that their images are familiar to us over 150 years later.…
Julia Margaret Cameron was famous for her misty photographs of the literati of Victorian England…
Enchanted Islands are not rare in English Literature, but especially not in Tennyson’s poetry, where they abound ...…
The role of Poet Laureate often involves carefully containing public truths in poetic form to make it easier for the public to swallow.…
Written and read between 1830 and 1850, the Penny Dreadfuls were directly contemporary to Tennyson’s poetry.…
On display at Farringford is a ‘Magic Lantern’ which projected images painted on glass slides onto the walls.…
Financial risk overshadows the writing of Victorian England, particularly in the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell, Tennyson and Dickens.…
The Victorians have a reputation for being sexually repressed, but some of the poetry is erotically charged ...…
In Tennyson's time a good wallpaper became a statement of taste, and also class, almost directly reflective of the people who occupied the rooms.…
Sentimentality was a key genre for establishing much of what we take for granted in poetry and literature today…
"Crossing the Bar" is one of Tennyson's most famous poems. It is often read at funerals and memoria…
T.S. Eliot and Tennyson are frequently cited as two poets whose style and subjects totally differ from each other ...…
She thinks of nothing but the Isle of Wight, and she calls it the Island, as if there were no other island in the world.…
Thom Yorke of Radiohead is known for his erudite lyrics, many of which contain poetic references from Robert Frost, William Blake and Alfred Lord Tennyson…
Of all Tennyson’s poetry, ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ is the poem that most explicitly deals with this year’s National Poetry Day theme ‘Truth’.…
Tennyson and Edward Lear were both good friends and frequently exchanged letters and verse, with Lear even illustrating an edition of Tennyson’s poetry.…
Lionel Tennyson, grandson of Alfred and son of Hallam, was a famous cricketer renowned for his Captaincy of the England …
Tennyson’s changing attitude to his religion can be associated with his friendship with Edward Fitzgerald, famous for ...…
On the 210th anniversary of Tennyson’s Birthday he describes birthdays as a time when we look both forwards and backwards…
This line of Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline was said to be the last line that Tennyson read before he died…
Tennyson is a very well quoted poet, even recited by Dame Judi Dench as ‘M’ towards the end of the 007 film Skyfall from his poem Ulysses.…
Tennyson was always a performer, and concentrated very much on his looks. During his years at Farringford he grew the large beard...…
If you have visited Farringford House you will have seen that the lawns at the front of the house which are as extensive now …
Scientific and poetic discoveries moved hand in hand at Farringford where both Tennyson and Darwin took steps…
When I found out about Tennyson’s friendships with Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear through my visit to Farringford…
Though I no longer write this blog regularly, as I said in my last blog, I will send in contributions as and when I c…
Tennyson and Charles Dickens crossed paths a number of times and while they respected one another’s work, they …
A feeling Allingham recorded of a visit to Farringford in June of 1865 reveals both one of the reasons he and Tennyso…
Allingham’s Move to Lymington,According to his diary, Allingham tried, and failed, to settle in Londo…
In I preached Tennyson to them , my last blog…
William Allingham’s Works, Mark Samuels Lasner laments, in William Allingham: A Bibliographical Study …
In my blog Fiddlededeeism I wrote about the paintings Edward…
Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep…
Walking up the drive to Farringford and catching sight of the huge old cedar reminded me of a poem Tennyson wrote for…
During this last winter we received full planning permission for the final phase of the restoration program, started …
Dodgson's Dogged Determination or a Coincidence?,It is well known both that Tennyson had many famous …
'There was an Old Derry down Derry, who loved to see little folks merry', Edward Lear…
In the Lancelot and Elaine section of The Idylls of the King…
In a previous blog I looked at G. F. Watts but he is perhaps best remembered for his portraits.…
A Times Literary Supplement review drew my attention to an…
Tennyson only met Prince Albert once and at the time of …
The January entries in Emily Tennyson's journal show that life was fairly quiet, though Alfred Tennyson seems …
In The Lady of Shalott (1888) John William Waterhouse depicts a scene from the final section of Tennyson's poem…
This week I read some of the entries in The Farringford Journal of Emily Tennyson, 1853-1864 (1986) edited b…
I was always curious about extracts from various journals and written accounts of Farringford, telling us that there …
Restoration to the main house is well under way. Every day brings steady progress, and occasionally an exciting disco…
All roofing and structural elements are now complete so the house is at last watertight. The top floor study and atti…
It is an exciting time here at Farringford. With all the necessary planning permission now in place we are three mont…
The Lady of Shalott, In 1894 John William Waterhouse painted the scene from just after the Lady of Shalott l…
John William Waterhouse the Pre-Raphaelite painter, was inspired by three scenes in Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’…
Yesterday I spent a pleasant afternoon leafing through some of Tennyson? letters published by Harvard in 1987. I was …
Many Tennyson enthusiasts will know that his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly in September 1833. Hallam…
Alfred, Lord Tennyson died on 6 October 1892. A few years later his friend, George Frederick Watts began work on a me…
Julia Margaret Cameron was a 19th-century portrait British photographer who took pictures of famous people of the tim…
Farringford is being restored, as far as possible, back to how it would have looked when Tennyson lived wrote ...…
It is well known that Queen Victoria turned to the poem In Memoriam in her grief after Prince Alberts…
While reading Tennyson’s letters I was struck by the number he had written to Queen Victoria. I had heard that …
While reading through Tennyson’s letters last week I came across a letter about a beetle the poet…
We're experimenting with having a poetry Blog, here's our first submission which was lucky enough…
In Memoriam,quite rightly comes up frequently in discussions of grief and loss, but the poem isn’t only about Tennyson…