Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
a file on a man who is, I think it's fair to
say, the architect of the way we speak. Oh, absolutely.
Especially about grief, about loss, and heroism
in, well, in the English language. He really
is. If you grew up speaking English, I guarantee
this man's words are rattling around in your
head whether you even realize it or not. We're
talking about Alfred. Lord Tennyson. The giant
is usually the word that comes to mind. You really
can't talk about the Victorian era or the whole
mindset of the 19th century without putting Tennyson
dead center. Right at the middle of it. He is
the sun that everything else orbited around for
about 50 years. Seriously. And that's what struck
me looking at the research stack you sent over.
We usually think of the Victorian era as this
buttoned up, stiff upper lip period. Very proper,
very repressed. Exactly. But when you look at
Tennyson. the guy who literally defined the voice
of that era, he is chaotic. He's a mess. He's
messy. He's deeply clinically depressed for huge
chunks of his life. He's obsessed with the sound
of words to a degree that, and I found this fascinating,
some of his contemporaries thought was actually
a symptom of mental illness. It is a massive
contradiction, and that is what makes him so
fun to analyze. You have the public figure, the
bearded sage, you know, the establishment guy
who was poet laureate for over 40 years. 42 years,
I think. But underneath that laurel wreath, he
was just this raw... exposed nerve of a human
being. Okay, so before we get into the messiness,
and I really want to get into the wood carving
scheme because that just blew my mind. Oh, the
wood carving, yeah. I want to prove to you, the
listener, just how embedded this guy is. You
pulled a stat from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
I did. He is the ninth most frequently quoted
writer in the entire dictionary. That is wild.
Top 10 all time. All time. That puts him up there
with Shakespeare and the Bible. And Pope. Yeah.
And the funny thing is, people quote him constantly
without knowing it's him. It's just in the air.
His words have just seeped into the groundwater.
It's incredible. Give us the greatest hits. I
want to see if I can recognize them without knowing
the source. Okay, well, the big one, obviously,
you see this on Instagram, you hear it in rom
-coms. Tis better to have loved and lost. than
never to have loved at all okay yes i feel like
i see that cross -stitched on pillows that's
tennyson That is Tennyson. And usually people
use it in the context of, you know, a breakup.
Oh, well, at least I dated him. Sure. But when
you find out why he wrote it and who he was writing
it for, it takes on this much heavier, darker
meaning. It's not about a breakup. It's about
death. We're definitely going to unpack that.
OK. What else? If you talk about the military
or corporate duty or even just a bad boss, you
know this one. There's not to reason why. There's
but to do and die. The Charge of the White Brigade,
of course. Exactly. A poem about a complete military
blunder that somehow became an anthem for bravery.
It's a neat trick. That's amazing. And then if
you look at how we talk about nature or evolution,
there's the phrase, nature, red in tooth and
claw. Wait, red in tooth and claw is Tennyson?
I honestly thought that was Charles Darwin. Everyone
thinks that. Or maybe, like... A tagline for
a nature documentary. It sounds so scientific,
doesn't it? But Tennyson actually wrote that
before Darwin published The Origin of Species.
No way. Yes. He was already wrestling with the
brutality of nature. This idea that nature is
a violence machine before the science even fully
caught up. OK, so that sets the stakes. Yeah.
We aren't just talking about a guy who wrote
some rhymes in a dusty library. We are talking
about the source code. for a lot of our modern
idioms. That's a great way to put it, source
code. But the mission for this deep dive is to
move past the quotes. I want to understand the
guy, because the stack of notes we have, biographies,
letters, analysis, it paints a picture of someone
who is, well... Weird might be the wrong word,
but certainly intense. Intense is definitely
the right word. Hypersensitive is another one.
We have no seer on his time in the House of Lords.
His wax cylinder voice recordings, which is a
creepy story in itself. I can't wait for that.
And his waking trances. The trances. That was
the part of the research that made me stop and
just say, OK, this isn't what I expected from
a Victorian gentleman. No, it's fascinating stuff.
It borders on the psychedelic, really. Let's
peel this back to understand the man. We have
to start at the beginning. And usually when we
do these deep dives, the childhood is just a
preamble. You know, born here, went to school
there, setting the stage. But with Tennyson,
it feels like the childhood is the whole engine
of the story. If you don't understand the house
he grew up in, you don't understand the poetry
at all. Absolutely. You cannot understand Alfred
Tennyson without understanding the Summersby
rectory and the. The shadow that hung over it.
Let's go to Summersby, Lincolnshire. 1809. August
6th, 1809. That's the birth date. And on paper,
you know, looking at the census or whatever,
this looks like a pretty standard setup. Successful
middle class family. Dad's a clergyman. Lots
of kids running around. It sounds like the setting
of a Jane Austen novel. Right. A bit pastoral,
a bit cozy. It looks like a Jane Austen novel
on the outside, maybe Pride and Prejudice, but
inside it was more like Wuthering Heights or
a gothic horror story. Why? What was the dynamic?
Because they had money, right? They were descended
from earls or something. They had the blood,
but the money is where the trauma starts. It
all centers on his father, George Clayton Tennyson.
Okay. Now, George was the eldest son of a very
wealthy landowner and lawyer, also named George
Tennyson. By all the laws of English tradition,
specifically primogeniture George, Alford's father,
should have inherited everything. The land, the
money, the power, the whole estate. Primogeniture
is that firstborn takes all rule, right? It's
the rule that drives the plot of, like, Succession
and Game of Thrones. Correct. It keeps the estate
intact. But George didn't get it. Why not? Was
he illegitimate or something? Nope. He was legitimate.
But his father, so Alfred's grandfather, who
was known as the old man of the wolds, decided
he simply didn't like George very much. He didn't
like him. He favored the younger brother, Charles.
So the grandfather orchestrates this massive
betrayal. He passes over George, the rightful
heir, and gives the entire fortune and the estates
to the younger brother, Charles. That is brutal.
So George is just cut out. Just, sorry, I like
your brother better. Effectively, yes. And it
gets worse. Because George was a man of, they
said, superior abilities. The records show he
was talented in architecture, painting, music,
poetry. He had this real artistic spirit. He
probably would have been a great patron of the
arts or a gentleman scholar. But because he was
disinherited, he had to make a living. Right.
He needed a job. So he was forced into the church.
He became the rector of Summersby, a country
clergyman. So you have a guy who should have
been a wealthy landowner. Who has the soul of
an artist, and he's forced to be a small -town
preacher while his little brother lives in the
family castle. Literally the family castle down
the road. Precisely. And that injustice didn't
just annoy him. It broke him. It festered. The
atmosphere in the Summersby Rectory was thick
with bitterness. The father was an alcoholic,
prone to black moods, fits of rage, and then
these periods of... Total despondency. So he
was unstable. Very. He felt cheated by the universe.
He felt the world was fundamentally unfair. And
Alfred is growing up right in the middle of this.
He's soaking it all in. The family was comfortably
well off in the sense that they weren't starving.
They could afford summer holidays to the coast
at Mablethorpe and Skegness. Okay, so not poor,
but... But the psychological weight was crushing.
Tennyson later called it the black blood of the
Tennysons. He was terrified for his whole life
that he had inherited this melancholia, this
mental instability from his father. It sounds
like a pressure cooker. But here's the twist
that I found interesting in the notes. Despite
the dad being so bitter and having these black
moods, he was actually a really good teacher,
wasn't he? He was. He didn't check out on the
kids. He didn't. That's the complexity of the
man. George poured all that artistic energy,
however frustrated it was, into his children.
He built a massive library in the rectory. He
drilled them in the classics, Virgil, Horace,
Homer. So he was very involved in their education.
Deeply. And it wasn't just Alfred. The literary
talent in that house was just overflowing. Alfred
had two brothers, Charles and Frederick, and
they were all writing poetry in their teens.
I saw that note. They published a book. They
did. Poems by Two Brothers. Alfred was only 17.
17. It was actually Poems by Three Brothers.
Frederick contributed a few, but they titled
it Two Brothers. 17 years old and publishing
a collection of poetry. That is precocious. I
was playing video games at 17. It is. And it
shows they were just desperate to escape that
house to make a mark. They were looking for an
outlet and they were looking up to Lord Byron.
Byron was the rock star of the day. The ultimate
idol for a brooding, unhappy teenager. Byron
represents... That is the most emo thing I have
ever heard. Yeah. Carving Byron is dead into
a rock. It just shows how deeply he felt things,
doesn't it? He was devastated. You can see that
romantic, dark, Byronic influence all over his
early work. He was trying to channel that same
intensity. So we have the environment, dark,
intellectual, high pressure, bitter. But then
there's this internal thing, this waking trance
I mentioned earlier. Can you walk me through
this? Because this comes from a psychology textbook,
not a literary one. Right. This is cited in William
James's classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
James, who is basically the father of American
psychology, uses Tennyson as a case study for
mystical experiences. What was happening to him?
Was he having seizures? No, it was self -induced.
Tennyson describes it as something that started
when he was a boy, usually when he was all alone
in that very crowded house. Yeah. He would start
repeating his own name, Alfred. Alfred, Alfred,
just saying it over and over again, softly to
himself. OK, I've done that as a kid. You say
a word enough times and it starts to sound like
nonsense. It's called semantic satiation. Right.
But for Tennyson, it went further than just the
word losing meaning. He said that as he did it.
But individuality itself seemed to dissolve and
fade away into boundless being. Boundless being.
That sounds like a trip. Like ego death. It does.
It sounds like something you'd hear from a Zen
monk or someone on psychedelics. But he was very
specific about it. He insisted this wasn't a
hallucination or a state of confusion. He called
it the clearest, the surest of the sure, utterly
beyond words. It was like he was hacking his
own brain to bypass his ego and touch something
infinite. So why does this matter for us? Thus
reading his poetry. Is it just a cool anecdote
or does it change the work? It matters because
it explains his obsession with sound. Think about
how he got there. By repeating a word, by the
rhythm, the chant. Tennyson's poetry is famous
for its musicality, its rhythm. Right. He wasn't
just writing for the page, he was writing for
the ear. He was trying to use the sound of words
to induce that same kind of trance in the reader.
So when we read him, we're supposed to feel that
rhythm. Yes, he's an auditory poet. He's trying
to dissolve the boundaries of the self through
rhythm. He was a mystic who happened to write
poetry. If you read his poems out loud, which
you absolutely should, you start to feel that
hypnotic quality. That completely changes how
I view him. He's not just observing nature. He's
trying to break through reality. OK, so he survives
the childhood. He has these mystical experiences
and finally gets to escape. He leaves the rectory.
He heads to university. Trinity College, Cambridge
in 1827. And this is where the world just opens
up from. It's a total transformation. He leaves
the toxic, isolated atmosphere of Summersby and
steps into the center of intellectual life. He's
big. He was over six feet tall. He's handsome.
He's brilliant. And he gets tapped for a secret
society. The Cambridge Apostles. Yeah. Which
is just a cool name. It sounds like a conspiracy
thriller. It was an exclusive debating club.
The absolute brightest minds of the generation.
They would meet to eat sardines, drink coffee,
and debate the nature of God and the universe.
And it was there, in that circle, that he met
the most important person in his life. Arthur
Hallam. Arthur Henry Hallam. Now we need to pause
on Hallam. Because usually in these stories,
in biopics, in movies, the most important relationship
is a romance. It's a wife or a lover or a muse.
Sure. But with Tennyson, it's this guy, Arthur
Hallam. Who was he? Hallam was everything Tennyson
wasn't. Tennyson was shy, gruff, messy, socially
awkward, carrying all that baggage from his father.
Hallam was the golden boy. He was charismatic,
articulate, the life of the party. He was widely
considered the most promising young man of his
generation. Everyone thought Hallam was going
to be prime minister one day. And they just clicked.
Instant connection. They became inseparable.
Hallam was the first person to really look at
Tennyson's poetry and say, you are a genius.
You are the poet we've been waiting for. He validated
it. He was his champion. He was. And the bond
got even deeper because Hallam went home with
Tennyson to Summersby and fell in love with Tennyson's
sister, Amelia. Oh, wow. So they were literally
going to be brothers. They were engaged. So Hallam
is his best friend, his artistic champion, his
intellectual equal, and his future brother -in
-law. Tennyson's life finally looks like it's
on track. He wins the Chancellor's Gold Medal
for a poem called Timbuktu. Timbuktu. The City
in Mali. Yes. It was the subject set for the
prize that year. Tennyson reworked an old poem
he had written about Armageddon, slapped the
title Timbutt II on it, and won. That's resourceful.
It was considered no slight honor for a 20 -year
-old. Then, in 1830, he publishes his first real
solo book, Poems, chiefly lyrical. It's got Claribel
and Mariana in it. He's rising. It feels like
the start of a great career. The trajectory is
pointing straight up, and then we hit 1833. The
pivot point. This year seems like a disaster
on every single level. It's like the universe
just decided to humble him. It starts with professional
failure. He releases his second book. This one
has the first version of The Lady of Shalott,
which we now think of as a masterpiece. An absolute
classic. It's iconic, but the critics at the
time didn't think so. What happened? They shredded
it. One reviewer called it drivel. They mocked
his affectations. And you have to remember, Tennyson
had that thin skin from his father. Right. He
was hypersensitive. He took criticism incredibly
personally. He was so hurt by the reviews that
he effectively went silent. He didn't publish
another book for 10 years. 10 years? That's a
career ender for most people. He just took his
ball and went home. He kept writing. In fact,
he wrote more than ever, but he refused to publish.
He went into a shell. He didn't want to give
the critics more ammunition. But the reviews,
they were nothing compared to what happened next.
The tragedy. Arthur Hallam was in Vienna. He
was on holiday with his father. He was only 22
years old. Perfectly healthy. And one afternoon,
he just died. Just like that. No warning. A sudden
cerebral hemorrhage. A stroke. He went to take
a nap on the sofa and never woke up. His father
came in and thought he was sleeping. I can't
even imagine that phone call, or I guess that
letter, since it's 1833. You're young, you think
you have forever, and your anchor, the guy who
believes in you more than anyone, is just gone.
It completely shattered Tennyson. The sources
say the effect was profound, but that's a huge
understatement. It broke him. He lost his best
friend, his confidant, and his link to the world.
And his future brother -in -law. Exactly. And
because Hallam was engaged to Amelia, the whole
family was plunged into mourning. It wasn't just
losing a friend, it was losing a future. And
this is where the deep dive really gets interesting.
Because most people would crumble. And Tennyson
did crumble. But what did he do with the pieces?
He wrote, he stopped publishing, but he started
writing furiously. He used the grief as fuel.
This is when he starts writing the elegies that
would eventually become an emorium. He wrote,
in the valley of Cotterets. So it was like the
grief unlocked a new level of depth in him. Exactly.
Before this, his poetry was beautiful, melodic,
but maybe a little decorative, a little bit art
for art's sake. After Hallam dies, it becomes
real. It becomes a desperate search for meaning.
He's asking, where did my friend go? Does the
universe make any sense? So he's in this wilderness
period. His friend is dead. He's not publishing.
He's just drifting. But then... It gets weirder.
He makes some really, really bad decisions, right?
This is the part I've been waiting for. He really
does. This is the part of the biography that
usually gets skipped in English class because
it doesn't fit the wise poet narrative. Of course
not. The family eventually gets kicked out of
the Summersby Rectory because the father dies,
and a new rector needs the house. They move to
Epping Forest around 1837, and Tennyson befriends
a guy named Dr. Allen. Dr. Allen, who ran an
asylum? Yes, a nearby asylum. Matthew Allen.
charismatic talker, a bit of a schemer, and Dr.
Allen had a surefire business idea. Uh -oh. He
pitched Tennyson on a startup. Please tell me
what the startup was. Ecclesiastical wood carving.
I'm sorry. Using a new machine, a pyroglyph,
to carve fancy wood decorations for churches
and homes, like automated manufacturing of gothic
wood panels. That was the pitch. We're going
to disrupt the church wood carving industry with
steam power. That was the pitch. And Tennyson,
who was desperate for money to support his mother
and siblings, and who probably wanted to secure
his future so he could marry, went all in. Oh,
no. He sold his small patrimony. He invested
the family fortune. This is a train wreck in
slow motion. It is. Dr. Allen didn't really have
the technology worked out. The business model
was flawed. And you can guess what happened.
What do you think? It was a total disaster. The
unwise investment wiped them out. The family
lost nearly everything. Tennyson was humiliated.
So now look at the scoreboard. His best friend
is dead. The critics hate him. He hasn't published
in years. And he just lost all his money on a
wood carving scheme. He hit rock bottom. He fell
into a serious clinical depression. He actually
had to go into a hydropathic establishment like
a water cure sanitarium to recover. He was physically
ill from the stress. It's incredible that he
survived this. I mean, honestly, looking at that
list of failures, most people would just check
out. But this brings us to the comeback, 1842.
The turning point. He finally decides to face
the public again. He needs money, and he knows
the only thing he can actually do is write. He
publishes the two -volume poems. Volume 1 is
the old stuff, heavily revised, because he's
been obsessively editing for 10 years. Volume
2 is the new stuff. And this time. Immediate
success. The critics had changed. The public
taste had changed. This is the volume that has
the heavy hitters. Loxley Hall. Break, break,
break. And crucially, Ulysses. We have to talk
about Ulysses because that poem, I mean, Judi
Dench quotes it in Skyfall. It's the ultimate
never give up anthem. It is. But knowing what
we know now, knowing about the wood carving,
the depression, the death of Hallam, listen to
the context. He wrote Ulysses shortly after Hallam
died. So it's not about a Greek hero. It is about
Odysseus, the Greek hero. The poem imagines him
as an old man back home after the Trojan War.
He's bored. He's sitting by the hearth among
these barren crags. And he realizes he can't
just rot there. He has to go back to sea. He
has to do something before he dies. But really,
it's Tennyson talking to himself. Exactly. The
famous last lines. To strive, to seek, to find,
and not to yield. When you read that on a motivational
poster. It sounds triumphant, like a guy winning
a marathon or something. When you realize Tennyson
wrote it while he was suicidal, broke, and grieving,
it's not a victory lap. It's a survival strategy.
He is screaming at himself, do not yield. Wow.
He is forcing himself to get out of bed. That
gives me chills. It changes it from a slogan
into a lifeline. I am in hell. but I am going
to keep walking. Precisely, and the Victorian
public loved it. They needed that resilience.
The Industrial Revolution was happening, the
world was changing so fast, and people felt unmoored.
Tennyson gave them a voice that said, it's okay
to struggle as long as you keep moving. So he's
back. He's famous. But he's not quite at the
top yet. That happens in 1850, the golden year.
1850 is arguably the best year any writer has
ever had in history. Three massive life events
happen almost at once. It's his Annus Mirabilis,
his miracle year. Break it down for us. What
happens? First, the personal. He gets married.
Finally. To Emily Selwood. Yes. And this is a
whole romance saga in itself. They'd known each
other for years. They were engaged way back.
But then the engagement was broken off because
Tennyson was too poor. Thanks to the wood carving
disaster. Exactly. And her father forbade the
marriage. He didn't want his daughter marrying
a penniless poet. But now that Tennyson is selling
books and making money, the objection is dropped.
They finally tie the knot. He gets the girl.
Check. What's number two? The masterpiece. He
finally publishes the thing he's been working
on for 17 years in Memoriam AHH. 17 years. That's
how long you worked on it. It's a collection
of 133 separate poems or cantos, all elegies
for Hallam. He wrote them piece by piece over
nearly two decades. It's not just a poem. It's
a diary of grief. A diary. It tracks his journey
from the moment Hallam died. Total despair, shock
through the anger, the doubt about God, the seasonal
cycles of memory, and finally to acceptance and
hope. That's a long time to live with a ghost.
It is. But when it was published, anonymously
at first, it was a sensation. It became the most
popular book of the era besides the Bible. Everyone
who had lost someone read it. It was like a manual
for how to grieve. And number three. The promotion.
William Wordsworth, the old poet laureate, dies
in 1850. The job opens up. It's the highest honor
a poet can get in Britain. Who picks the poet
laureate? The queen. Technically, the prime minister
advises the monarch. They offered it to Samuel
Rogers first. He was a wealthy banker poet, but
he was ancient, 87 years old. He said, I'm too
old to do the work. Fair enough. So they had
to look for the next best option. Prince Albert,
the queen's husband, was a fan of Tennyson. So
Alfred Tennyson was appointed poet laureate of
United Kingdom. Talk about a good year. Married?
Published his magnum opus and gets the top job
in poetry with a government salary. And just
like that, the disinherited boy from the toxic
rectory becomes the official voice of the British
Empire. It's a complete turnaround. And this
wasn't just a government appointment. Queen Victoria
herself was an ardent admirer. Oh, that's right.
And this connection is really interesting. We
tend to think of the queen as this distant figure.
But remember, later on in 1861. her husband prince
albert dies and she went into mourning for the
rest of her life deep deep mourning she wore
black for 40 years she barely appeared in public
and what did she read in memoriam so tannison
who spent 17 years grieving hallam was the only
person who had the language to match her grief
Precisely. She wrote in her diary that she was
much soothed and pleased by reading it. She felt
that Tennyson understood her pain when no one
else did. They met twice. Her diary entry about
their first meeting in 1862 is hilarious. What
does she say? She describes him as very peculiar
looking, tall, dark, oddly dressed. Which is
queen speak for he looked like a mess. He did.
He had this long flowing black hair, a giant
unkempt beard. He wore a big slouch hat and a
cape. He looked like a wizard or a drifter. He
didn't look like a courtier. But she noted there
was no affectation. He wasn't faking it. He wasn't
pretending. He was just him. She found him very
elevated and unworldly. They were grief buddies.
In a way, yes. The queen and the poet bonded
by loss. So he holds this job for 42 years, the
longest tenure ever. But being laureate isn't
just hanging out with the queen and talking about
sadness, right? It's a job. You have to write
stuff for the state. It's a weird job. You're
a government employee, essentially. You have
to write verses for royal weddings, greetings
to visiting princesses, odes for the funerals
of generals. Which brings us to the most famous
work assignment in history, the Charge of the
Light Brigade. Written in 1855, the Crimean War.
Talk about threading a needle. Because the actual
event, the charge, was a total disaster, wasn't
it? It was a screw -up by the generals. A massive
blunder. Due to a miscommunication, the Light
Brigade Light Cavalry was ordered to charge straight
into Russian cannons. It was a suicide mission.
A complete catastrophe. 600 men charged, huge
casualties. The public was furious at the leadership.
So Tennyson has a problem. He's the poet laureate.
He can't trash the army or the government. But
he also can't pretend it was a great victory
because everyone knows 600 guys just got slaughtered
for no reason. So what does he do? He shifts
the focus. He focuses entirely on the soldier's
duty. There's not to reason why, there's but
to do and die. Right. He acknowledges the mistake.
He explicitly writes someone had blundered. But
he frames the obedience of the soldiers as the
highest form of bravery. He separates the warrior
from the war. Exactly. He honors the sacrifice
without validating the strategy. It's a master
class in public relations poetry. And it worked.
The poem became definitive. It transformed a
military embarrassment into a legend of British
stoicism. I want to pivot back to the craftsman
side of him. Because you mentioned earlier that
he was obsessive. How obsessive were we talking?
Robert Browning, who was another famous poet
of the time and a friend of Tennyson, called
Tennyson's editing process insane. Insane. He
said it was a symptom of mental infirmity. That's
harsh. You edit so much you must be crazy. But
it goes back to the waking trance. Tennyson felt
the rhythm physically. He wouldn't let a line
go until the sound was perfect. He would read
lines out loud thousands of times. Take break.
break break that's the poem about the sea right
it's about grief written for hallam but he uses
the sea to show it the rhythm is break break
break it's a hard insistent beat three stresses
it mimics the waves crashing against the cold
gray stones he's not telling you he's sad he's
using the rhythm to make you feel the monotony
and the physical weight of the sorrow it's like
a heartbeat the sad one or take the princess
There's a famous example of onomatopoeia words
that sound like what they describe. The moan
of doves in immemorial elms and murmuring of
innumerable bees. Murmuring of innumerable bees.
You can literally hear the buzzing, the M and
Z sounds. That's onomatopoeia on steroids. He
is painting with sound. He wants the listener
to be immersed in the sensory experience. And
the crazy thing is we can actually hear him doing
it. The wax cylinders. This is the tech part
of the story. Yes. Late in his life, around 1890,
this guy, Colonel George Edward Gouraud, who
was Thomas Edison's agent in Europe, showed up
at Tennyson's house with a phonograph. We have
audio of a guy born in 1809. We do. It's available
online. It's incredibly scratchy. It sounds like
a ghost shouting through a storm, but you can
hear him grooming out the Charge of the Light
Brigade. What does he sound like? Does he sound
posh? He sounds ancient. He has this deep, resonant,
almost chanting voice. He doesn't read it like
a conversation. He chants it. It confirms everything
we thought about his focus on rhythm. It's a
direct audio. link to the Victorian mindset.
That is incredible. I love whom technology lets
us touch the past like that. But let's look at
his mind, not just his voice. Because the Victorian
era was a time of massive change. Science is
exploding. Geology is proving the earth is old.
Darwin is publishing. The Bible is being questioned.
Where did Tennyson stand on all this? Was he
a religious conservative? This is why he's still
relevant today. He wasn't a dogmatic conservative,
but he wasn't an atheist either. He lived in
the tension. He practiced what he called honest
doubt. There lives more faith in honest doubt,
believe me, than in half the creeds. That's the
line. He's saying that questioning the universe,
wrestling with God, is actually more holy than
just blindly following rules because you're told
to. He looked at the fossil record, he read books
by Charles Lyell on geology, and he saw extinction.
He saw that nature wipes out entire species.
And that scared him. It terrified him. He asked,
if nature is this brutal, if species just die
out and turn to rock, does God actually care
about us, or are we just next on the list? That's
the red in tooth and claw idea. Right. He stared
into the abyss of a godless, violent universe,
and he tried to build a bridge of faith across
it. He didn't deny the science. He tried to integrate
it. By the end of his life, his beliefs were
very unique. He leaned toward agnosticism and
pandeism. Pandeism. Break that down for me. It's
the idea that God became the universe, that the
divine and the physical are one and the same.
On his deathbed, he was quoting Spinoza and Giordano
Bruno philosophers who were considered heretics
by the mainstream church. So the pillar of the
establishment, the queen's favorite poet, was
basically a mystic heretic in private. He was
a seeker. He never stopped wrestling with the
big questions. He refused to give easy answers.
We should briefly touch on his politics, because
for a guy who was so open -minded about the universe.
He was kind of elitist about voting, wasn't he?
He was a man of his time and his class. He was
a Whig by tradition. He believed in gradual and
steady reform, not revolution. He looked at the
French Revolution and saw chaos. He didn't want
that for England. So he didn't want everyone
to vote. He was wary of the mob. He thought people
should only get the vote once they were educated
enough to use it responsibly. He wanted evolution.
not revolution gradual reform it sounds very
safe very establishment but he did have his moments
of enthusiasm there's a great story that when
the reform act of 1832 passed which was the first
big step in giving more people the vote a young
tennyson and his brothers broke into a local
church at night just to ring the bells in celebration.
Breaking and entering for democracy. I like it.
It shows he had a pulse. But eventually he became
part of the system. He became a lord. A reluctant
lord. Very reluctant. Benjamin Disraeli, the
prime minister, offered him a baronetcy twice
in 1865 and 1868. Tennyson said no both times.
Why? Did he think he was too cool for it? He
just wasn't interested in the pomp. He just wanted
to write. But finally in 1883, William Gladstone,
another prime minister and a friend, convinced
him to accept a priest. peerage. In 1884, Queen
Victoria created him Baron Tennyson of Aldworth
and Freshwater. He took his seat in the House
of Lords. The first poet to be raised to the
peerage just for being a poet. Correct. Not because
he was a soldier or politician, but because he
wrote poems. It showed just how high his status
had risen. He was a national institution. He
was the voice of England. So we've tracked him
from the bitter childhood to the wood carving
disaster to the House of Lords. Let's wrap this
up with his legacy. We talked about the quotes,
but visually he changed things too. Huge influence
on the Pre -Raphaelite Brotherhood. You know
those famous Victorian paintings? The beautiful
women with red hair, medieval dresses, looking
very tragic in boats or towers. The Lady of Shalott
vibe. Looking like they're floating in water
with flowers. That is pure Tennyson. Painters
like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt,
and John William Waterhouse were obsessed with
his imagery. He created the visual language of
fantasy. the Arthurian legend, the knights, the
damsels, that we still recognize today. If you
like fantasy art, you owe a debt to Tennyson.
And we mentioned James Bond earlier. I want to
circle back to that because it's such a perfect
example of his staying power. Skyfall, 2012.
It's the perfect modern usage. You have M, played
by Judi Dench, standing in a courtroom. She's
being accused of being outdated, of being a relic
of the Cold War. She's defending her relevance
and the relevance of human intelligence over
computers. And what does she quote? She quotes
Ulysses. We are not now that strength which in
old days moved earth and heaven. That which we
are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts,
made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
It connects that Victorian resolve to the modern
world. It shows that the struggle to keep going
when you're old, when you're tired, when the
world has changed around you is timeless. Whether
you are a Greek hero, a Victorian poet, or the
head of MI6, that sentiment lands. The soundtrack
even has a track titled Tennyson. That is how
crucial that moment was. And then, of course,
there is his death. He died at his home, Aldworth,
on October 6, 1892. He was 83 years old. A good
run, especially for a guy who was frail and depressed
in his 30s. A very good run. He was buried at
Westminster Abbey in Poets' Corner, which is
fitting, and his last words were very writerly.
Oh, that press will have me now. Imagine that,
on your deathbed, thinking about the newspaper
reviews. Or perhaps he meant the printing press,
that he was becoming text, becoming history.
And his son... Hallam, named after his dead friend,
succeeded him and even became the second governor
general of Australia. So the legacy continued.
Indeed. So let's wrap this up. We've gone from
the bitter childhood to the trance, the grief,
the woodcarving disaster, and finally the House
of Lords. What is the big takeaway here? How
should we think of Tennyson? For me, it is the
contradiction. T .S. Eliot called Tennyson the
saddest of all English poets, and W .H. Auden
called him the stupidest, which I think is incredibly
unfair. But he meant that Tennyson was all feeling
and little intellectual rigor. Ouch. Auden coming
in with a steel chair. Right. But I think the
truth is in the middle. Tennyson wrote, It is
that faith in honest doubt thing again. Exactly.
We live in a world where everyone seems so certain.
Everyone is shouting their opinions online. Everyone
knows exactly what is right and wrong. Tennyson
reminds us that there is dignity in the struggle.
There is dignity in not knowing, in grieving,
and in just trying to keep moving forward. And
that resilience isn't about winning. It's about
refusing to stop. To strive, to seek, to find,
and not to yield. I think that's the note to
leave it on. Next time you feel like the world
is too much or you're stuck in the past or you
just took a massive loss, don't just read Ulysses
as a classic poem. Read it as an instruction
manual. Read it as a permission slip to keep
going, even when the odds are against you. And
maybe, just maybe, try repeating your own name
until the walls of reality dissolve. You never
know what you might find. Proceed with caution
on that one. Thanks for diving deep with us.
We'll see you on the next one.