Alfred, Lord Tennyson

When Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly in Vienna in 1833 at twenty-two, his closest friend Alfred Tennyson sat down and began writing. He did not stop for seventeen years. What eventually emerged was In Memoriam A.H.H. — a 133-canto elegy that Queen Victoria said comforted her more than any other book after Prince Albert's death.

• Born: August 6, 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, England
• Died: October 6, 1892, Aldworth, Surrey, England (age 83)
• Era: Victorian; Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland, 1850–1892
• Major works: In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), Idylls of the King (1859–1885), Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830)
• Poet Laureate tenure: 42 years — the longest in British history

Tennyson was one of eleven children born to a Lincolnshire rector whose mental instability and alcoholism shadowed the household. He published his first collection at seventeen, drawing enough attention that by the time he reached Cambridge he was already being taken seriously. When Hallam died, the grief did not break him — it focused him. "Ulysses," written in the weeks after Hallam's death, became one of the most quoted poems about perseverance in the English language: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

He spent a decade in what critics called "the ten years' silence" after a harsh reception of his 1832 collection — writing constantly but publishing almost nothing. When he re-emerged with the two-volume Poems of 1842, the response was decisive. His appointment as Poet Laureate in 1850, the same year In Memoriam appeared and the same year he finally married Emily Sellwood after an eleven-year engagement broken off twice over money, marked the arrival of a poet who had earned every word of his reputation.

His verses were recited at funerals, packed by explorers on expeditions, and repeated by people who couldn't always name who wrote them. "Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all" is from In Memoriam. So is "I am a part of all that I have met." Both are lines written from the bottom of grief, which is the only place from which they could have been written with that kind of authority.

He died at eighty-three with a Shakespeare volume open on his bed. His last word, reportedly, was "Shakespeare." The man who spent forty-two years carrying the title of national poet turned out to have spent his whole life in conversation with the writer he most admired.

These words are for the people who carry their losses forward rather than leaving them behind — who know that grief, handled honestly, can produce something worth passing on.