Lord Alfred Tennyson was the most popular British poet of the Victorian era, although he avoided public life. “Tennyson earned his standing in literature through the extraordinary range of his talents and his dedication over his long career to perfecting his craft.” "Tennyson's long list of works showed his consistent inspiration and creative vitality, beginning with the poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and extending to The Death of Oenone and Other Poems, published after his death more than 60 years later" (Dunn 169). Tennyson's works were melancholic and reflected the moral and intellectual values ​​of his time, which made them particularly vulnerable to later criticism. His father noticed Alfred's potential to write excellent poetic lyrics at an early age. Born on 6 August 1809, Alfred Tennyson was the fourth of twelve children of a Lincolnshire rector and the daughter of a vicar. At the age of seven he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in Louth to attend grammar school there. Alfred only remained there until the age of eleven when he returned to the family home in Somersby (Kunitz 610). At the young age of twelve he wrote an epic poem of 6,000 lines. His father, the Reverend George Tennyson, taught his children classical and modern languages. His father was a man of culture and early recognized the extraordinary promise of this boy who was a voracious reader and a talented author. “If Alfred dies,” the father observed when his son was only in his early teens, “one of our greatest poets will be gone” (Kunitz 610). In the 1820s, however, Tennyson's father began to suffer frequent mental breakdowns aggravated by alcoholism. “One of Tennyson's brothers had violent arguments with his father, a second was later committed to an asylum, and another became an opium addict” (Everett 1). In 1828, Alfred, with his closest brother Charles, enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, where their brother Frederick was already a student. He studied there for less than three years, seemed not to have learned much and deeply disliked Cambridge. In 1830 Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, and in 1832 he published a second volume entitled simply Poems. "A fierce criticism of the poems published in 1833, made by the Quarterly Review, so depressed the sensitive poet that he did not publish another volume for nine years.