T.S. Eliot said that Tennyson had 'the finest ear of any English poet since Milton' and it's, arguably, the music of his poetry which has ensured his continual popularity. The embodiment of high Victorian values, admired by the likes of Macaulay, Thackeray, Gladstone and Queen Victoria, Tennyson's reputation has ebbed and flowed since his death - even in his own lifetime some of his latter work was thought to be below par- but by the end of the 20th century his gift for the lyric in poems such as Maud (1855) was critically acknowledged.

Born into a family troubled by, what was then euphemistically referred to as, 'Black Blood' (epilepsy, depression and alcoholism - his father, George Tennyson, a Lincolnshire rector was a violent alcoholic), Tennyson became the Poet Laureate on Wordsworth's death in 1850. In the same year he published what many regard as his greatest work, In Memoriam (an elegy to his Cambridge friend A.H. Hallam who had died in 1833) and married Emily Sellwood, to whom he'd been engaged for a number of years. The Charge of the Light Brigade, his most famous poem, was inspired by reading a report in The Times newspaper about the death of over 200 British soldiers in a military blunder at Balaclava near Sebastopol in 1854.