Tennyson could slip into a trance just by repeating his own name
From boyhood, Alfred Tennyson reported a strange waking state brought on by saying his own name over and over, until his sense of self seemed to melt away. William James later cited it in a study of religious experience. The same man became Victorian England's longest-serving Poet Laureate and recorded his voice on wax cylinders.
Tennyson was born in 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire, one of a large family headed by an Anglican rector who dabbled in painting, music and architecture. As a boy he worshipped Byron, and by seventeen he and two older brothers had seen a joint volume of their verse printed locally. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he joined the secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles and won the Chancellor's Gold Medal in 1829 for a poem called Timbuktu. His father's death in 1831 forced him home before he could graduate.
The defining friendship of his life was with Arthur Hallam, a fellow Cambridge poet who got engaged to Tennyson's sister Emilia. In 1833 Hallam died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in Vienna, aged 22. That same year a harsh critical reception for Tennyson's second book, containing the first Lady of Shalott, left him so discouraged that he published nothing for a decade. Worse followed: a rash investment in a wood-carving venture run by a local asylum doctor wiped out much of the family money and plunged him into depression.
The recovery came in stages. His two-volume Poems of 1842, featuring Ulysses and Locksley Hall, was an immediate success. In 1850 he finally released In Memoriam, his long elegy for Hallam, married his childhood acquaintance Emily Sellwood and succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, a post he held for 42 years. The Charge of the Light Brigade, written in 1855, honoured cavalrymen from a disastrous Crimean War attack the previous October. He turned down a baronetcy twice before accepting a peerage in 1884. Fame had a price: sightseers pestered him so relentlessly at Farringford on the Isle of Wight that in 1869 he moved to Aldworth in West Sussex.
Politically he favoured slow reform, yet when the Reform Act passed in 1832 he broke into a church to ring its bells. Late in life, Thomas Edison's European agent recorded him reading his verse, though the cylinders crackle badly. He died in 1892.
Source: Alfred, Lord Tennyson
