Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), created Baron Tennyson in 1884, was the leading English poet of the Victorian age. The son of a Lincolnshire rector, he published his first volumes while at Cambridge, where his friendship with Arthur Hallam and Hallam's early death gave him the subject of In Memoriam (1850). That year he became Poet Laureate, a post he held for forty-two years, writing "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and the Arthurian Idylls of the King (1859–85) among much else. "Ulysses," "The Lady of Shalott," "Tithonus" and "Crossing the Bar" are among his best-known shorter poems. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.