Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1809–1892 · English Poet Laureate

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland for most of Queen Victoria’s reign and the most popular poet of the Victorian era. In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), a sequence of 131 short cantos written over seventeen years, mourns his friend Arthur Henry Hallam and helped secure his appointment as Laureate that same year. He also gave the language “Theirs not to reason why” and “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”

Traced to source

1 quote we’ve traced

“'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”

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Not actually Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Often misattributed to Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Famous lines widely pinned on Alfred, Lord Tennyson that we’ve traced to someone else.

“If I Had a Single Flower for Every Time I Think of You, I Could Walk Forever in My Garden”

actually Claudia Adrienne Grandi

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