Alfred Tennyson was Poet Laureate for forty-two years and wrote lines that entered English so completely that most people who quote them do not know they are quoting: nature red in tooth and claw; better to have loved and lost; theirs not to reason why. In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) is his masterpiece — 133 short lyrics written over seventeen years after the sudden death of his friend Arthur Hallam, tracking grief through doubt, geology, evolutionary time and eventual, incomplete consolation. Victoria said it comforted her more than the Bible after Albert died, and it got Tennyson the laureateship. Idylls of the King, written across twenty-five years, retold the Arthurian legend as a moral history of a kingdom's rise and rot, and outsold everything. "Ulysses" gave English its most quoted argument for pressing on regardless. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" was written in minutes from a newspaper report. He came from a disinherited branch of a Lincolnshire family, and spent a decade in poverty and obscurity after early reviews savaged him. He died in 1892 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.