John bachelor tennyson biography of alberta
An early victim to the reading habit.
Biography....
Tennyson: To Strive, To Seek, To Find
Early in his new biography on Tennyson, Newcastle academic John Batchelor describes his subject with vigor: “Alfred was well over six feet, broad-chested, with a mysterious Spanish swarthiness and strikingly opulent dark curling hair, which he grew long.
He also had magnificent eyes, deep-set and melancholy, with a distant longing in them. That he was woefully short-sighted added to the mysteriousness of his gaze and his air of looking above and beyond his immediate surroundings.
His resonant bass chest voice was so melodious (despite his Lincolnshire accent) that he was constantly in demand to perform his own poetry.”
This romantic description of the poet seems odd when considering Batchelor’s goal for his new biography, which he notes in his preface: to show Tennyson as “stronger, more self-reliant, more businesslike, tougher and more centrally Victorian than previous biographies have displayed.” And Batchelor d
