Frederick Tennyson

Frederick Tennyson (5 June 1807 - 26 February 1898) was an English poet.

Frederick Tennyson (1807-1898), from The Shorter Poems of Frederick Tennyson, 1913. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Life

Overview

Frederick Tennyson

Frederick Tennyson was the eldest son of the rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire, and brother of Alfred Tennyson. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he passed most of his life in Italy and Jersey. He contributed to the Poems by Two Brothers, and produced Days and Hours (lyrics) (1854), The Isles of Greece (1890), Daphne (1891), and Poems of the Day and Night (1895). All his works show passages of genuine poetic power.

Youth and education

Tennyson was born at Louth, Lincolnshire, the 2nd son of Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire. Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson was his younger brother. As a young man he contributed 4 poems to the Poems by Two Brothers, written by his brothers Alfred and Charles.

He was educated at Eton, leaving as captain of the school in 1827; and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a B.A. in 1832. At college he gained the Browne medal for Greek verse and other distinctions.

Adult life

During his subsequent life Tennyson lived little in England. He spent much time in travel, and resided for 20 years at Florence, where he was friend of the Brownings. There he met his future wife, Maria Giuliotti, daughter of the chief magistrate of Siena, whom he married in 1839.

In 1854 he published a volume entitled Days and Hours, concerning which some correspondence will be found in the ‘Letters of Edward Fitzgerald;’ it was also praised by Charles Kingsley in The Critic. Discouraged, however, by the general tenor of the criticism his poetry encountered, he published no more until 1890.

After 20 years in Italy he moved to St. Ewold's, Jersey, where he remained until 1896. In 1890 he printed an epic, The Isles of Greece, based upon a few surviving fragments of Sappho and Alcæus. Daphne followed in 1891, and in 1895 Poems of the Day and Year,’ in which a portion of Days and Hours was reproduced. None of these volumes seems to have attracted any wide notice.

The poet was for some years under the influence of Swedenborg and other mystical religionists, but returned in his last years to the more simple Christian faith of his childhood.

Later he resided with his only son, Captain Julius Tennyson, and his wife at Kensington. He died at their house on 26 February 1898.

The Spectator on Tennyson

"Mr. Charles Tennyson, in his introduction to The Shorter Poems of Frederick Tennyson, has given us a curious and interesting account of their author, a man in whom even prejudice and eccentricity became lovable through the candour and simplicity of his mind. When we once recognize a man's prejudices to be merely formal in their nature and mechanical in their action, we are inclined to indulge them, and to consider them with sympathy and humour.

"It is curious that one who had been a distinguished cricketer at Eton and captain of the Oppidans, who had taken the Browne medal at Cambridge and retained throughout his life an unswerving devotion to Greek and Roman literature, should have become at Florence, under the tuition of Mrs. Browning, a disciple of Swedenborg .and a spirit-rapper, and afterwards in Jersey, under Henry Melville, a student of 'an ancient and long-forgotten science of astrology, in which was to be found the true explanation of Masonic Symbolism.' There was at the same time a certain largeness in the man. Even with reference to Masonic Symbolism, FitzGerald could write of him that he was 'quite grand and sincere in this as in all else, with the faith of a gigantic child — pathetic and yet humorous to consort with.'

"Perhaps both his eccentricity and his largeness of mind are reflected in the family myth which represented him at Florence 'living in a vast hall designed by Michelangelo, surrounded by forty fiddlers.' Apart from his eccentricities he had qualities of mind which, with more directive ability and a finer critical sense, might have amounted to genius.

Writing

Tennyson was from the start overshadowed by the greater genius of his brother, Alfred. His lyric gift was considerable, his poetic workmanship choice and fine, and the atmosphere of his poetry always noble. But he has remained almost unknown to the modern student of poetry, and a selection of 4 lyrics in Palgrave's second Golden Treasury probably for the first time made Frederick Tennyson something more than a name to readers.

The Spectator: "The verses collected in [The Shorter Poems of Frederick Tennyson] have the grace and freshness, the spontaneity, which lyrics should have; but beyond that it is difficult to go. He had an amazing facility, and his work is full of felicitous passages with a certain decorative value, as in the lines upon a skylark:—

'How far he seems, how far,

With the light upon his wings!

Is it a bird or star

That shines and sings?'

"It is verse which is full of melody, and yet there is no single poem in the book which can be considered as an organic whole. They are improvisations, and to that are owing both their beauties and their defects."

Recognition

Tennyson's poem "The Holy Tide" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Publications

The Holy Tide - Frederick Tennyson

Poetry

• Days and Hours. London: J.W. Parker, 1854.
• Ariadne. London: privately printed, 1887.
• Aeson. London: privately printed, 1888.
• Hesperides. London: privately printed, 1888.
• The Isles of Greece: Sappho and Alcæus. London & New York: Macmillan, 1890.
• Daphne, and other poems. London & New York: Macmillan, 1891.
• Shorter Poems (edited by Charles Tennyson). London: Macmillan, 1894.
• Poems of the Day and Year. London: John Lane; Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

References

•  Ainger, Alfred (1898) "Tennyson, Frederick" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 56 London: Smith, Elder, p. 75  . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 6, 2017.

External links

Poems

• "The Holy Tide"
• "The Birth of the Year"
• Tennyson in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895: "Thirty-first of May," "The Blackbird," from "Niobe"
• Frederick Tennyson at PoemHunter (3 poems)

Books

• Frederick Tennyson at Amazon.com

About

• "Frederick Tennyson: His Great Age and the Life he Led, New York Times
• Frederick Tennyson in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature.
• Tennyson and his brothers, Frederick and Charles
• review of The Shorter Poems of Frederick Tennyson in The Spectator
• Introduction to The Shorter Poems of Frederick Tennyson, 1913

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Tennyson, Frederick