Free Download Lord Byron and Lord Tennyson: The Lives and Works of 19th Century England's Most Famous Poets by Charles River Editors
English | September 29, 2025 | ISBN: N/A | ASIN: B0FT62Z3D6 | 153 pages | EPUB | 26 Mb
Lord Byron's very name conjures up visions of the Romantic movement and outlandishly dressed bohemians, for if Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the poetic darling of the masses, Byron was the hero of the hedonists. While the traditional English literary hero was a nobleman rescuing a damsel in distress, Byron created the anti-hero, a man plagued by self-doubt and hidden sorrow. At the same time, his hero was also capable of facing reality once he had wrestled through his own angst, and even of occasionally acting nobly in the great tradition of the author's Puritan forebears.
Whereas poets like Wordsworth and Browning were easy to love, Lord Byron inspired a certain amount of fear among the upper classes, and pious mothers were reluctant to let their daughters read his work. In a manner more appropriate to the 21st century than the 19th, Lord Byron was a man true to his own beliefs, supporting the rights of the oppressed even while enjoying all the benefits offered to him as a member of the British aristocracy.
If Byron himself was eclectic in his tastes and character, his poetry was even more so, for he could feature satiric pieces poking fun at the status quo and historical renditions of ancient battles fought with nobility and valor, all in the same volume. Like so many other writers, he used poetry to explore his own most deeply guarded secrets, in one poem playing in first person the dramatic hero and in another the troubled penitent. He was sometimes funny, sometimes lyrical, and sometimes verbose, but he was always interesting, and that is what allowed him to become one of the most famous writers of all time, almost against his own will, and despite his premature death.
Born to a father plagued by bouts of drinking and depression, and surrounded by siblings with similar ailments, Alfred Tennyson grew up believing that he must be a victim of hereditary illness, to the point that he believed he must never marry or father children less he perpetuate the suffering on future generations. With these thoughts always in his head, he turned his mind towards a near worship of romantic love, while at the same time repeatedly painting a tragic ending for his most cherished characters, many of whom seemed to die of a broken heart or some illness or accident related to it.
While in college, Tennyson made new friends, young men who might have shown him the lighter side of life, but he became extremely close to one, only to see his friend die a sudden and tragic death much too young. Out of this suffering came the work that would bring Tennyson the most fame and fortune during his lifetime, but it also brought years of grappling with misery as he attempted to carve out some sense of reason in a world devoid of his close companion.
By the time Tennyson began to prosper, he was so accustomed to sorrow that he felt compelled to seek it out, focusing his attention in his middle years not on the comfortable home and growing family he had been blessed with, but instead on the tragic losses experienced by his country during the Crimean War. As Queen Victoria's poet laureate, Tennyson soon found a comfortable niche in a court accustomed to mourning, and in his final decades, the poet wrote one acclaimed piece after another that was perfectly attuned to the fatalistic Victorian aristocracy.
It is only slightly ironic, then, that it was his focus on death that gave him immortality, for through the romantic eyes of young Anne Shirley, of Anne of Green Gables fame, that people today learn of the Lady of Shallot. Likewise, few English speakers make it through the pains of adolescence without being told it is better to have loved and lost, and even fewer make it to adulthood without learning that sometimes ours is not to reason why. Thus, in death, Tennyson found, at least in literary terms, eternal life.
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