Tennyson as a representative poet of the victorian age.

Tennyson as a representative poet of the victorian age.
⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘
In the book 'A critical history of English Poetry' Grieson and Smith sum up their critical appraisal of Tennyson in the following words ''Few Poets have been gifted with greater sensibility of eye and ear, none ever laboured more diligently at his art. He was not a great original thinker, but through a long life he keep abreast of the thought of his time. He remain the representative poet of Victorian Age''. In the opinion of Edward Albert, Tennyson was content to mirror the feelings and aspirations of his time and he produced a number such occasional poem as earn him the name of 'the newspaper of his time'. This is why David Daiches hold that Tennyson felt that he had a mission to be the Victorian poet_prophet. And sir Ifor Evans charges him with redusing the plan of the Arthurian stories to the necessities of Victorian morality and with failing to look upon his age with unabashed, far seeing eye.
                     It is a fact that Tennyson was to his age what chaucer was to the 14thC, Spencer was to Elizabethan age and Alexander Pope was to the 18thC. He believed that it was the duty of the poet to interpret the spirit of his time and he did that whole-heartedly his poetry. For about 50 years he was the voice of the whole nation and expressed in exquisite melody its doubts and despair, its faith and religion, its joys and sorrow, its victory and defeat. Like so many man of his time he was worrior who worked about God, man and nature, about modern science and its effect on belief, about Darwin and the significance of his theory of evolution, about the meaning of life. His poetry is more an expression of his time, than his own feeling and emotions, thought and beliefs.
Tennyson's age was an age of peace and settled government. The Victorians had a great love for law and order, discipline and Tennyson's poetry reflects this craving of the age for the authority of law and order and discipline.This insistence on law constrained the poet to accept individualism and unbridled freedom to act according to one's whims and facies. He believed in slow progress and shunned revolution that upset the order of the society. This is why,while conceding the clains of  coming democracy he uphelled the old aristocracy. So he wrote not only 'The Mary Queen' and 'Dora but also ' The Princess ' and 'The idyllic of the king. His praise for his own country is the expression of a Victorian patriot who consider his country superior to another countries of the world and call it " A land of settled government".
                          The Victorians condemned illigal gratification of sex and Tennyson's poetry reflects this spirit of the age by pointing out again and again that true love can be found only in married life. The kind of love,that Tennyson idealises is well exemplified in 'The Miller's Daughter'. The Victorian who upheld moral values in domestic life had a particular fascination for moralizing.. It is not for nothing that we find a strong feeling for moral preaching and ethical edification in Tennyson's poetry. He turned to the Greek legend not so much for their stories and poeticality as for the sake of their ethical significance. The legendary hero of his 'illyses' imparts the message of action and urges the reason.
                         Tennyson is a representative Victorian figure in his passion and compromise, in his passion for compromise, in his desire to get it both ways, in his vaccillation between endorsement of the conventions and pre- occupation of his age and out-spoken criticism of them. This is why Tennyson is said to have helped to established a conventionally held notion of 'poetic'. Anyway, he is a monumentally representative figure of his own age and literature would be poorer without his poems.