Alfred Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry before leaving without a degree. He succeeded William Wordsworth as Britain's Poet Laureate in 1850, a post he held for the rest of his life, and was among the most popular and widely read poets of the Victorian era, admired by Queen Victoria herself. His works include In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), a long elegy for his closest friend Arthur Hallam; "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854); and Idylls of the King, a cycle of narrative poems retelling the Arthurian legends that he composed and revised across three decades. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Tennyson in 1884 and died at his home on the Isle of Wight at eighty-three.