Biographical Sketch: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire (England). He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Arthur Henry Hallam, whom he later immortalized in In Memoriam (1850). Tennyson began to write when a child, largely to escape the oppressiveness of his homelife, made miserable by his father’s drinking and violence. He published some of his best-known poems, such as “Mariana” and “The Kraken,” when he was only twenty; in “Mariana,” he displays his early, and enduring, gift for suing objects and landscapes to convey states of mind and particular emotions. Between 1833, the date of Hallam’s death, and 1843, when Tennyson received an annual government pension to support his writing, he was especially hard-hit by the melancholia that would plague him all his life and so dominate his poetry. In the wake of Hallam’s death, Tennyson’s work assumed a decidedly darker note. He expressed his grief abstrusely in such poems as “Ullyses” and “Break, Break, Break” and directly in In Memoriam, a series of 131 quatrain stanzas written in iambic tetrameter, which Tennyson began within days of Hallam’s death and continued to write over a period of seventeen years. With the publication of In Memoriam, he finally attained the public recognition long denied him and earned syfficient money to marry Emily Sellwood after a ten-year on-again off-again courtship. He remained immensely popular until his death. His last major work was Idylls of the King, a project that occupied him for nearly fifty years; the first four idylls were published in 1859, and the complete cycle of twelve in 1885. In the work, which popularized the then obscure Arthurian legend, Tennyson upholds medieval ideals, such as community, heroism, and courtly love, and compares the decay of the Round Table to the moral decline of his own society.

Biographical Sketch: John Keats (1795-1821)

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John Keats was born in London, the son of a livery stableman and his wife. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon, and on completion of his apprenticeship did further training at Guy’s Hospital, London. Having qualified, Keats abandoned medicine for poetry. In 1818 he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, but was prevented from marrying her by financial difficulties. In 1819, his annus mirabilis, he produced all of his great odes, a number of fine sonnets, and several other masterpieces. The following year, he developed tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother and beloved younger brother, Tom. Hoping to prolong his life, he traveled to Italy, but died in Rome the following spring. At the time of his death he had published only fifty-four poems, and his reputation as a great poet was by no means secure. In his poetry he struggled to make sense of a world riddled with “misery, heartache and pain, sickness and oppression.” Rather than take solace in religious or philosophical creeds, as did Wordsworth and Coleridge, he strove to develop “negative capacity,” the ability to exist in a condition of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any reaching after fact and reason.” He looked to sensation, passion, and imagination to guide him: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affection and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth,” he wrote to a friend. Despite the brevity of his life and writing career, Keats mastered a number of difficult forms, producing complex variations of the ode and the Petrachan and Shakespearian sonnets.

Biographical Sketch: George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

George Gordon Byron was born near Aberdeen, Scotland, to dissolute aristocratic parents who had fallen on hard times. Their difficulties were alleviated when Byron inherited his title at age of then. Upon graduation from Trinity College, Cambridge, he embarked on a two-year tour of Portugal, Spain, Malta, Greece, and Asia-Minor, during which he gathered much of the material for his most important poems. He became a celebrity overnight in 1812 with the publication of his first collection of poems, but notoriety supplanted fame when Byron’s affair with his half-sister, whom he had met as an adult, became public knowledge. His marriage collapsed and he was forced to leave England in 1816. He followed the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to Geneva and Italy, then went on to Greece where he organized a contingent of soldiers to fight for independence from the Turks. After he fell sick in the woods during a training exercise and died, he was mourned as a national hero throughout Greece. His work was widely known in Europe and was immensely influential on the major European writers of his day. Perhaps his most significant contribution to literature was the development of the Byronic hero, a doomed but impassioned wandered, often driven by guilt and alienated from his society, but superior to it. Byron’s work was deeply rooted in the literary tradition; he turned to the past for models, drawing heavily on the Cavalier tradition of paying elaborate compliments to ladies, the satiric tradition of launching witty criticism of modern civilizations, and the narrative tradition. In Don Juan, his masterpiece, he uses the narrator to attack such institutions as the government, the church, and marriage; criticize such vices as hypocrisy, greed, and lust; and subtly extol such virtues as courage, loyalty, and candor. Although many critics considered the poem a wanton celebration of the misadventures of profligate, Byron himself called it “the most moral or poems.” His formal achievement was great. He worked with apparent facility in established meters, such as blank verse, terza-rima, and ottava-rima, and elaborate forms such as the ode and the Spenserian stanza. From The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.

Biographical Sketch: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary, a rural village in Devon, and raised in London. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, but fell into a dissolute lifestyle. He fled to London and served in the Light Dragoons until his brothers secured his release some months later. In 1795 he met Wordsworth, with whom he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), one of the most revolutionary collections of poetry in the history of English literature. From the age of thirty, Coleridge largely gave up poetry for philosophy and criticism. He is credited with introducing the works of the philosophers Immanuel Kant, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Friedrich von Schelling to England. At the height of his powers, he became addicted to opium, which had been prescribed to relieve agonizing physical pains that Wordsworth said were so unbearable they drove Coleridge to “throw himself down and writhe like a worm upon the ground.” He spent his last years in the care of a clergyman, writing and attempting to be reconciled with estranged family and friends. In an age dominated by skepticism and empiricism, Coleridge held fast to his belief in the powers of the imagination, which he believed capable of leading humanity to Truth – not through appeals to reason, but to the senses. Like Wordsworth, he strove to express “natural thoughts with natural diction” and to use simple syntax. His accessible style reached its culmination in his meditative, blank-verse “Conversational poems,” which influenced writers as diverse as Matthews Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. Coleridge worked in both established forms, such as the ode, and fluid forms of his own making. He eschewed the use of conventional “mechanic” or “pre-ordained” forms that did not arise “out of the properties of the material” but were imposed from without, as when “to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish to retain when hardened,” for “organic” form, which arises “out of the properties of the material” and “shapes as it develops itself from within.” If Wordsworth determined the content of a century or more English poetry, Coleridge determined its shape. His theories on “organic form” provided a basis for the development of a freer poetic, and may have been the progenitor of many twentieth-century experiments in free verse.

From The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.

Biographical Sketch: William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

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William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the north of England’s Lake District, and was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge. A walking tour of Europe in his early twenties brought him into contact with the first throes of the French Revolution, whose ideals he supported until the onset of the Terror. Upon his return to England, he settled with his sister, Dorothy, in the Lake District, where, apart from some few brief travels, he remained for the rest of his life. In 1795 he met the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), one of the most important works in the history of English literature, both for its innovative poetry and for Wordsworth’s preface to its second edition (1800). In his later years Wordsworth grew increasingly conservative, and many former devotees accused him of apostasy, but his poetry remained both popular and influential – so influential and so formative of modern ideas about poetry that the scope of his achievement is easily overlooked. In his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth attacks the poetic diction and elaborate figures of speech characteristic of eighteenth-century poetry, asserting that he had “taken as much pains to avoid it as others take to produce it,” and advocating the “language really used by men.” He rejected the notion of a poetic hierarchy ranking epic and tragedy over the subjective mode of lyric; declared “incidents and situations from common life” as fit subjects for art; and substituted sincerity for studied artifice. The accessibility of Wordsworth’s poetry and his “democratizing” theory should not divert attention from his painstaking and complex technique. Many of his poems are written in strict and elaborate forms, or blank verse; their effect might be one of spontaneity, but it results from careful construction. Wordsworth ascribed to art the duty of cultivating emotional and moral response in an increasingly desensitized age, one more interested in titillation than meditation.

From: The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th Edition.

Biographical Sketch: William Blake (1757-1827)

William Blake was born in London. He attended art schools, including the Royal Academy school, and at the age of fourteen was apprenticed to an engraver. In 1800 he secured a patron at Gelpham, but found the arrangement stultifying. Determined to follow his “Divine Visions,” he returned to London. He published numerous collections of poetry illustrated with his own fantastic etchings until the 1820s, when he devoted himself exclusively to pictorial art. His early work reveals his dissatisfaction with the prevailing literary styles of his day; he took as his models the Elizabethan and early seventeenth-century poets, the Ossianic poems, and the work of Collins, Chatterton, and other eighteenth-century poets working outside the prevailing contemporary literary conventions. He discarded the heroic couplet for lines ending in near and partial rhyme, and employed novel rhythms and bold figures of speech that conveyed a multiplicity of meanings. Between 1795 and 1820, Blake developed a complex mythology to explain human history and suffering and came to see himself as a visionary, prophet figure, or Bard. His writings in this vein center around the biblical stories of the Fall, the Redemption, and the reestablishment of Eden, but Blake gave these materials his own spin. In his mythos, the Fall is seen as a psychic disintegration that results from the “original sin” of Selfhood, and the Redemption and return to Eden as a reinstitution of psychic wholeness, a “Resurrection of Unity.” His schema centers around a “Universal Man” who incorporates God rather than around a transcendent Being distinct from humanity.

From: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.