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Biography on Alfred, Lord Tennyson: More than any other Victorian writer, Tennyson has seemed the embodiment of his age, both to his contemporaries and to modern readers. In his own day he was said to be—with Queen Victoria and Gladstone—one of the three most famous living persons, a reputation no other poet writing in English has ever had. As official poetic spokesman for the reign of Victoria, he felt called upon to celebrate a quickly changing industrial and mercantile world with which he felt little in common, for his de*pest sympathies were called forth by an unaltered rural England; the conflict between what he thought of as his duty to society and his allegiance to the eternal beauty of nature seems peculiarly Victorian. Even his most severe critics have always recognized his lyric gift for sound and cadence, a gift probably unequaled in the history of English poetry, but one so absolute that it has sometimes been mistaken for mere thank the ancient Greeks for systematizing an understanding of meter and providing a vocabulary (including the words rhythm and meter) that enables us to discuss the art of poetry. Meter comes from a Greek word meaning “measure”: What we measure in the English language are the patterns of stressed (or accented) syllables that occur naturally when we speak, and, just as when we measure length, the unit we use in measuring poetry is the foot. Most traditional poetry in English uses the accentual-syllabic form of meter- meaning that its rhythmic pattern is based on both a set number of syllables per line and a regular pattern of accents in each line. Not all poems have a regular metrical pattern, and not all metered poems follow only one pattern throughout. But like everyday speech, the language of poetry always has some accents (as in this italic emphasis on “some”), and poets arrange that rhythm for effect. Thus in nonmetrical as well as metrical poetry, a reader should “listen” for patterns of stress. In Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” we