![]() These prints have demanded a fresh approach and I’ve been rising to the challenge. One of my new Yorkshire prints – rough grasses in a December afternoon dusk. I am making a set of Japanese woodblock prints of the North Yorkshire Moors. The all-consuming project is far more exciting. I’m getting over it and, if you’re prone to worrying about this kind of thing like me, have another biscuit and drop a few minor commitments too. ![]() It’s not a huge deal, I’m not writing anything more important than something to muse over while eating a biscuit. I’m guessing you’re OK with this blog missing the odd week or two*. I’m sure I’m not the only person to back themselves into a corner by making a commitment while failing to realise that it’s mainly, or even only, me that actually cares about it. Letting people down, however distant and virtual those people might be and however tenuous the promise, is a fear I have in common with many others and it’s one that’s easing gradually. I’m sure you’ll recognise the symptoms of starting a new project and the excitement of running with your ideas to the exclusion of everything else.įor most of my life the failure to provide a Friday blog as promised would be so anxiety inducing that I’d have made myself write one whatever the inconvenience. Writing came a poor second to printmaking that week and a good deal of the week before, as did laundry, regular meals, exercise and remembering not to hold my breath for long periods. He died in 1892.You might have noticed there was no Friday blog last week. Tennyson was offered a peerage in 1884 and so became Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Of their two children, the youngest, Lionel, died early of fever while returning from India. After a prolonged engagement, Tennyson married Emily Selwood. Tennyson’s personal life also had extremes of happiness and sorrow. His Idylls of the King (1859) projected Victorian values onto Arthurian figures and fed into England’s great national myth of being the best of all worlds. Upon the death of Wordsworth, Tennyson was named Poet Laureate (1850), confirming his place as one of England’s greatest poets. As his poems resonated with his readers, Tennyson’s fame grew. These tensions appear in “The Palace of Art” (1832), “The Lady of Shalott,” Maud (1855), and even “Ulysses.” In this poem, the protagonist wants to live life to the lees, yet foresees nothing but death before him. ![]() And it evinces his own propensity towards Romantic emotionalism and imagination, a propensity which he felt increasingly at odds with due to his era’s push towards outward action and realism. This poem marks both personal and general currents in Tennyson’s lifetime, for instance matching studies in geology with his own sense of despair. His need (and perhaps over-reliance) on Hallam’s help came to the fore upon Hallam’s unexpected, early death and Tennyson’s consequent writing of his great poem In Memoriam: To AHH. Among that group was Arthur Henry Hallam who encouraged Tennyson’s literary pursuits and who seemed to have helped him achieve a sense of self and identity independent from the ravages of his father’s mental instability. His extraordinary talent in writing poetry that incomparably matched sound and sense gave him ready entrée to The Apostles, an undergraduate society. Tennyson escaped the strains of this home environment by attending Trinity College at Cambridge University. George took to drink, drugs, and abusive behavior, including one time threatening to kill Alfred’s older brother. A profoundly unhappy and emotionally unstable man, George Tennyson had been disinherited by his rich father. Tennyson was one of twelve children born to George Clayton Tennyson, a rector, and Elizabeth Fychte. They may have been fostered by his painful childhood and early adulthood. These tendencies appear in the melancholy note of much of his early poetry, including “Oenone” (1829) and “Mariana” (1830). As with the Romantics, his first impulse was to think rather than do, and he relied more on emotional intelligence rather than rational judgment. \)Īlthough born in the Victorian era, Alfred, Lord Tennyson felt much affinity for the Romantic era.
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