'Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort.' Queen Victoria's reliance, after the death of Prince Albert, on this poem by Alfred Tennyson (1809 92), Poet Laureate from 1850, epitomises its place at the heart of Victorian public and private life. The most famous poem of its age and an instant bestseller, In Memoriam was an elegy for Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's closest friend, who had died young in Vienna in 1833. Its distinctive iambic tetrameter stanzas begun days after the news reached Tennyson, and reworked for the next seventeen years explore the nature of grief, religious...

'Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort.' Queen Victoria's reliance, after the death of Prince Albert, on this poem by Alfred Tennyson (1809 92), Poet Laureate from 1850, epitomises its place at the heart of Victorian public and private life. The most famous poem of its age and an instant bestseller, In Memoriam was an elegy for Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's closest friend, who had died young in Vienna in 1833. Its distinctive iambic tetrameter stanzas begun days after the news reached Tennyson, and reworked for the next seventeen years explore the nature of grief, religious...

Published in 1850, "In Memoriam" won its author the Poet Laureateship of Britain and received widespread attention from critics and reviewers, as well as ordinary readers. The poem was written in memory of Tennyson's close friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly in 1833; it became a kind of unofficial devotional manual for mourners, including Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert. The poem's scope goes beyond individual grief, however, to the development and extinction of species, audaciously exploring history, evolution and God's relationship with humanity. Its formal beauty...