The lives of the poets from The Dictionary of National Biography ...

1.7). In 1820 he left Louth, to be educated at home by his learned, violent, and often drunken father—who
believed in him. ‘My father who was a sort of Poet himself thought so highly of my first essay that he
prophesied I should be the greatest Poet of the Time’ (Trinity Notebook, 34).
Tennyson was to recall ruefully his youthful ambitions and poetical models. It was the mouthability of
poetry, the urge to roll it aloud, that drew him.
The first poetry that moved me was my own at five years old. When I was eight, I remember making a line
I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it was this: ‘With slaughterous sons of
thunder rolled the flood’—great nonsense of course, but I thought it fine. (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 2.93)
He was much moved by the death of Byron in 1824: ‘I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an
awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the
sandstone: “Byron is dead!”’ (ibid., 69).
Before I could read, I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind, and crying out ‘I
hear a voice thatʹs speaking in the wind’, and the words ‘far, far away’ had always a strange charm for me.
Tennyson spoke of the three‐book epic (‘à la Scott’) written in his ‘very earliest teens’. ‘I never felt so
inspired—I used to compose 60 or 70 lines in a breath. I used to shout them about the silent fields, leaping
over the hedges in my excitement’ (Trinity Notebook, 34; H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.11–12) .
Tennysonʹs prodigious excitement is evidenced in the play he wrote (1823–4) in imitation of Elizabethan
comedy, The Devil and the Lady, a wondrous pastiche, alive in its ambivalent erotic deploring, its vistas of
space, its anatomizing of old age, and its grim humour. Duller, placatingly conventional, there was
published in April 1827, by J. and J. Jackson, booksellers of Louth, Poems by Two Brothers (three brothers,
since Frederick supplied four poems for this volume by Charles and Alfred); it earned them £20 (more than
half in books) and courteous flat notices in the Literary Chronicle (19 May 1827) and the Gentlemanʹs
Magazine (June). Tennysonʹs unoriginal contributions were written ‘between 15 and 17’ (1893 reissue of
1827, quoting Tennyson). Wisely, he did not include any of them in later editions of his works.
But the Lincolnshire of Tennysonʹs young days was alive in his late poems, notably those in dialect,
‘wonderful studies in English vernacular life’ as Richard Holt Hutton called them (Hutton, 380). Tennysonʹs
gruff gnarled humour here found its local habitation and intonation, audible in his own recorded reading of
the best of them, ‘Northern Farmer: New Style’, ‘founded’, as Tennyson said, on a single sentence: ‘When I
canters my ʹerse along the ramper [highway] I ʹears “proputty, proputty, proputty”’ (Poems, 2.688).
Cambridge, Arthur Hallam, and early accomplishments
In November 1827 Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where Charles had just joined Frederick.
He was unhappy there at first (and often subsequently—see the bitter sonnet that he chose not to publish,
‘Lines on Cambridge of 1830’): ‘The country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous,
the studies of the University so uninteresting, so much matter of fact—none but dryheaded calculating
angular little gentlemen can take much delight’ in algebraic formulae (18 April 1828, Letters, 1.23). But
fortunately he came to know some well‐rounded larger gentlemen, foremost among them Arthur Henry
Hallam (1811–1833) [see under Hallam, Henry (1777–1859)], whom Tennyson met about April 1829. Hallam
had entered Trinity College the previous October. The friendship, deepening into love, of Hallam and
Tennyson was to be one of the most important experiences of Hallamʹs short life and of Tennysonʹs long one.
A further flowering at Cambridge: in October 1829 Tennyson was elected a member of the Apostles, an
informal debating society to which most of his Cambridge friends belonged (such eminent, though not pre‐
eminent, Victorians as John Kemble, Richard Chenevix Trench, Richard Monckton Milnes, and James
Spedding). Then in June 1829 he won the chancellorʹs gold medal with his prize poem on the set subject
Timbuctoo. Reworking an earlier poem (as he was so often to do with consummate re‐creative imagination),