Introduction
Frederick Tennyson (5 June 1807, Louth, Lincolnshire – 26 February 1898, Kensington) was an English poet.
Life
Frederick Tennyson was the eldest son of George Clayton Tennyson, Rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire, and brother of Alfred Tennyson. He was educated at Eton College (where, as a skilled cricketer, he was Captain of the Oppidans) and, from 1827, St John's College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge he contributed four poems to Poems, by Two Brothers, which Frederick, Alfred, and their brother Charles Tennyson Turner published in 1827. He also won the Browne medal for Greek verse composition (a Sapphic ode on the pyramids) in 1828, but was rusticated for three terms for refusal to accept punishment for not attending chapel. Re-admitted to Cambridge in 1830, he graduated BA in 1832.
Tennyson passed most of his subsequent life in Italy and Jersey. On his inheritance of an estate near Grimsby in 1833, he went firstly to Corfu, then settled for twenty years in Florence, where he was a friend of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In 1839 he married Maria Giuliotti, the daughter of the Chief magistrate of Tuscany.
He became an Anglo-Israelite and later joined the Church of the New Jerusalem.
Works
- Days and Hours, 1854
- The Isles of Greece: Sappho and Alcæus, 1890
- Daphne and other poems, 1891
- Poems of the Day and Year, 1895