Bloomsbury Poetry Classics are selections from the work of some of our greatest poets. The series is aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist and carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. This can be found elsewhere. In the series the poems introduce themselves, on an uncluttered page and in a format that is both attractive and convenient. The selections have been made by the distinguished poet, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton. Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge where he formed a close friendship with the poet and critic Arthur Hallam. It was Hallam's early death in 1833 that inspired Tennyson's great sequence of elegies In Memoriam, published in 1850. In the same year he married Emily Sellwood and was appointed Poet Laureate. From the age of 41 until his death in 1892 Tennyson was thought of as the official bard of Victorian England, and enjoyed a status and popularity that few poets have enjoyed, before or since. In the early 20th century his reputation dwindled, but in recent years there has been a willingness to look beyond the official, jingoistic laureate to discover the Tennyson whom T.S. Eliot called the saddest of all English poets.