The most inscrutable of poets

Where our great Victorian writers are concerned we live in an age of rolling biography and contradictory interpretation. I’ve read half a dozen lives of the poet since picking up, as a schoolboy, the Penguin paperback of Harold Nicolson’s Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, with its diagnosis of a crippling case of Victorian timidity: ‘Tennyson was afraid of death and sex and God.’ I got the point, and read In Memoriam with knowing condescension. Case settled.

But not for long. Since then there have been biographies which have focused, by way of explanation, on the ‘black blood’ running through the Tennyson family; the traumatic domestic regime imposed by the poet’s dipsomaniac clergyman father; morbid fear of epilepsy and/or venereal disease; addiction to opium and/or alcohol; psycho-sexual hysteria on being rejected by his true-love Rosa Baring; suppressed homosexuality; furtive homosexual practice; incestuous desire for his sister Emily; excessive masturbation.