Alfred. Lord Tennyson (1809-92) was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the sixth of eleven children of a clergyman. His two volumes of Poems (1842) established him as the leading poet of his generation, and of the Victorian period. He was created Poet Laureate in 1850 and in 1883 accepted a peerage. In T. S. Eliot’s words: ‘he had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton.