Victorian Era Life: Inspiration Revealed Essay -- Literary Analysis, T

Is it not true that events from the past can subsequently affect or influence the events of the future? This is certainly demonstrated in the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson. His nineteenth century background is clearly evident in his poetry. Inspirations for majorities of his works were from people he knew, occurrences in his life, imagery of trials, tribulations, love, and death in the Victorian era. His literary works in Poems of Tennyson 1830-1870 and The Poems and Plays of Tennyson strictly show the effects of his background during his adolescence and early adulthood. Tennyson was born in 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England; the fourth of twelve children (Everett). After leaving grammar school in 1820, his father, a rector, managed to give him a broad literary education, despite difficult conditions at home (â€Å"Tennyson†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ). As a precocious young man, Alfred learned to write in styles of John Milton, and Alexander Pope, as well as established an exceptional understanding of Elizabethan dramatic verse (Everett). William Wallace Robson says that by Tennyson’s early teens, â€Å"Lord Byron was a dominant influence on the young Tennyson† (Robson). Such an influence gave way to the young Tennyson’s The Devil and the Lady, a previously unpublished collection of poems, later published in 1930 with clear inspiration from his favorite childhood writers. Perhaps Tennyson’s father should have been an English teacher instead of a clergyman. While at the rectory, the Tennyson children found their own resources. In this respect, it is said, â€Å"All writers on Tennyson emphasize the influence of the Lincolnshire countryside on his poetry: the plain, the sea about his home, â€Å"the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea,† and... ...on of war from the influence from this historical part of his Victorian era background certainly facilitated his fame and success. Mesmerized by his surroundings and culture, Tennyson used everything he could from his life experiences to compose poetry with relevance and meaning to his time, which could also fit in the future. He used circumstances in his life to denote his own opinions. His poetry presents audiences with new outlooks on particular issues of his era, and further into our own. From death, depression and war, to love and ecstasy, Tennyson used what he was most familiar with in order to write lyrical verses that one can easily comprehend. His poetic works in Poems of Tennyson 1830-1870 and The Poems and Plays of Tennyson show the myriad ways that his background during his adolescence and adulthood affected his literary accomplishments overall.