ABSTRACT
On Wordsworth’s death in 1850 Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) was made Poet Laureate. We are apt to think of the award as officializing his identification with the spirit of the age and to consider him the literary representative of Victorianism: but his brilliance as a poetic craftsman and the readiness with which, in his finest work, he voices perturbations and aspirations of the mind and spirit that come to men in all ages, make the ‘Victorian’ tag ultimately dispensable.
