Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Quick answer: Tennyson craft guide for poets: vowel music, the In Memoriam stanza and refrains that haunt, plus his finest poems to begin reading and imitating.
Tennyson had perhaps the finest ear in English poetry. Contemporaries said he tested every line aloud, and it shows: his verse hums, tolls and murmurs with vowel patterns so exact that meaning arrives through sound before sense catches up. Any poet who wants to write lines people remember involuntarily should study how he tunes them.
He was also Victorian Britain's public poet for four decades, Laureate from 1850 until his death, proof that technical obsession and popular reach can share one career.
The poem
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'Ulysses' (1842)
Who Tennyson was
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) grew up in a troubled Lincolnshire rectory, found fame slowly, and was made Poet Laureate in 1850, the year In Memoriam appeared. That elegy, seventeen years in the writing after the sudden death of his friend Arthur Hallam, became one of the defining poems of the age.
He matters as the great craftsman of Victorian doubt: poems of mourning, duty and endurance built with a jeweller's precision, from 'Ulysses' to the Idylls of the King.
The signature moves
Four techniques repay imitation.
What you can learn from him
Read your drafts aloud and mark the vowels of your most important line; if they scatter, retune the wording until the sounds agree with the feeling. This is learnable, and Tennyson is the textbook.
Try the abba quatrain for any poem about loss or waiting. The envelope rhyme genuinely changes how the stanza feels, closing each unit back on itself. And give a refrain a job: let it return unchanged while everything around it worsens, so repetition measures the poem's descent.
Where to start reading
His range is wide; these five map it.
What poets can take from this
- Test every important line aloud; revise for vowel agreement, not just sense.
- Write a grief poem in abba quatrains and feel the enclosed rhyme circle.
- Give an ageing or exhausted speaker a monologue arguing for one more effort.
- Use one unchanging refrain against a deteriorating scene.
- Cut any line whose sound contradicts its meaning.
Try it yourself
Write a dramatic monologue for someone refusing to retire from something, a job, a sport, a marriage of habit, whose speech gradually reveals the cost of refusing.
Questions
What is the In Memoriam stanza?
A four-line iambic tetrameter stanza rhyming abba, named for Tennyson's elegy for Arthur Hallam. The enclosed rhyme gives it a circling, meditative movement suited to grief.
What is Tennyson's most famous poem?
'Ulysses' and 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' are his most quoted; In Memoriam is his masterpiece. 'Crossing the Bar' is traditionally printed last in his collected poems at his own request.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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