Alfred Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) was an English poet, Poet Laureate for forty-two years and the most popular poet of the Victorian age. His works — In Memoriam, the Arthurian Idylls of the King and such lyrics as "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and "Crossing the Bar" — gave the era its voice of doubt, duty and elegy.

Born in Lincolnshire and educated at Cambridge, Tennyson shaped Victorian poetry through formality and emotional compass, crystallising an age of religious uncertainty and imperial pride. He remains the most quoted of English poets after Shakespeare in the standard citations of the language.