Previous Exhibitions - Tennyson and Wordsworth: two great poems of 1850
Tennyson and Wordsworth: two great poems of 1850
16 May - 31 October 2009
2009 marks the bicentenary of Alfred Lord Tennyson's birth. We celebrate this occasion with this small exhibition dedicated to Wordsworth and Tennyson and, in particular, the events of their lives in 1850.
In April 1850, Wordsworth died aged eighty years old, an event followed almost immediately by the publication of his greatest poem, The Prelude. He began the poem over fifty years earlier and dedicated it to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his great friend and fellow poet. Its theme was autobiographical, 'The Growth of a Poet's Mind', and remarkable for its time.
By the time of his death, Wordsworth had been Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate for seven years. He was succeeded by Tennyson, then aged forty-one, who in the same year married Emily Sellwood and published In Memoriam, his greatest work. This poem, begun seventeen years earlier, is an elegiac sequence dedicated to Arthur Henry Hallam, his close friend who died in 1833. It contains two of the best-known lines of English poetry:
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Wordsworth and Tennyson had a profound influence upon their own and subsequent generations. This exhibition looks at the relationship between them, their laureateships, and the manuscripts of their greatest poems.
Read an extract of In Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Click here to find out more about The Prelude by William Wordsworth.
Read in full, The Prelude, Book First.
Read episodes from The Prelude:
Boat-stealing
Ice-skating
The Raven's Nest
There was a Boy
Trapping Woodcocks
Click here to turn the pages of the early Prelude from the Electronic Texts - From Goslar to Grasmere website - an interactive version of the original manuscript - (opens in a new window).
