Tennyson

American  

[ten-uh-suhn] / ˈtɛn ə sən /

noun

1. Alfred, Lord 1st Baron, 1809–92, English poet: poet laureate 1850–92.

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Tennyson British  

/ ˌtɛnɪˈsəʊnɪən, ˈtɛnɪsən /

noun

1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 1809–92, English poet; poet laureate (1850–92). His poems include The Lady of Shalott (1832), Morte d'Arthur (1842), the collection In Memoriam (1850), Maud (1855), and Idylls of the King (1859)

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Other Word Forms

• Tennysonian adjective

Example Sentences

Tennyson became the only poet laureate to be elevated to the House of Lords.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 20, 2026

Tennyson was a genius, but he was no intellectual.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 20, 2026

The poet appealed to Hallam’s imaginative depths, and Hallam brought the unkempt and solitary Tennyson into the world of the elite and affluent.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 20, 2026

Ancient, patriarchal and oracular, Tennyson was not merely the poet laureate of England; he was, like his queen, a symbol of the British Empire.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 20, 2026

The tweediness of our faculty, and the curriculum itself, which began, Hellenically, Byronically, with Homer, and then skipped straight to Chaucer, moving on to Shakespeare, Donne, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tennyson, and E. M. Forster.

From "Middlesex: A Novel" by Jeffrey Eugenides