In the sleepy town of Louth, Lincolnshire, the grammar school’s sports field is home to an ancient oak tree, providing the perfect spot to sit and read, or to dodge cross-country races. It only became known to me in year ten that this same tree my friends and I sat under to eat lunch, shaded from the beating sun in the summer by the canopy of branches, that Lord Alfred Tennyson sat under the oak as a student at my school, 200 years before, a time which for him was miserable and cold.

Lincolnshire, where Tennyson was born and returned to throughout his life, is full of places that the Poet Laureate, appointed in 1850, took inspiration from when writing his poems. The River Lymn, for instance, a gentle trickle which rises in the Wolds, is said to have been the inspiration for Tennyson’s much loved poem ‘The Brook’. One can recognise the connection through the reference to ‘thirty hills’, and the movement of the speaker winding ‘about, and in and out’. The river, and the Lincolnshire Wolds, both move in an undulating fashion that Tennyson clearly admired and desired to highlight, with Lincolnshire being the second biggest county in the country but rather tucked away.

Although the beauty of Lincolnshire enraptured Tennyson and played a pivotal part in his depictions of the natural landscape, his time there was not the happiest. In Tennyson and his Circle, Lynne Truss says that what Tennyson took from his childhood was “mainly fear”. It is widely reported by those who wrote on his life that Tennyson’s father, Charles, would frequently enter into drunken rages, and the young boy would run into the nearby graveyard and pray for death. Yet in all of his fear of inheriting the Tennyson ‘black blood’, Tennyson did not seem to show any instances of volatile temper, though throughout his life he was concerned about his sons inheriting such tendencies.

Yet Tennyson’s father was the man who encouraged his poetic practice, with Tennyson himself declaring that his father “prophesied I should be the greatest Poet of the Time” (C. Ricks, Tennyson). After experiencing bullying in the Louth school, Tennyson was educated at home by his father, with a focus on the classics, and full access to his father’s library. Tennyson, later recalling his poetic influences as a boy, was “an enormous admirer of Byron”, and when he was 17, a collection of poems by Tennyson and his brothers was published locally. Charles further urged Tennyson to submit a poem to the competition for the Chancellor’s gold medal for English verse while he was at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1829, which his poem ‘Timbuctoo’ won.

“Although tainted by grief, Tennyson focuses on the ‘pleasure’, or the ‘pleasant spots’ – the endearing memories and marks left – from a relationship that was birthed out of Cambridge”

Tennyson’s time in Cambridge, although short-lived, greatly influenced his later life. As a member of the Cambridge Apostles, or The Conversazione Society, which dated back to 1820, he was tasked with extra essays, which members would then gather to discuss, with a side of sardines on toast. Nikolai Endres described the society as a haven for “overt, full-blooded – almost aggressive – homosexuality,” while the mother of one Apostle, upon reading her son’s private letters, accused the Society of being “a hotbed of vice”.

Tennyson, however, only had a brief tenure ending in 1830 as a result of his failure to complete an essay on ghosts, which he tore up before resigning. The Apostles saw this as an ejection rather than a resignation, with a fellow member writing that he had been turned out for being “incurably lazy” – he used to lie on the floor in meetings and would never contribute to discussions. But when the Apostles tried to make amends a year later, Tennyson refused.

Cambridge was significant to Tennyson, not only for it being where he published his first solo collection of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830, but for it also being the place where his friendship with Arthur Hallam began. The four years at Cambridge between 1827 and 1831 brought the two poets very close together. But in the spring of 1831, Tennyson’s father died, forcing him to leave Cambridge and return to Lincolnshire before finishing his degree. Arthur Hallam came to stay with Tennyson during the summer, and became engaged to Tennyson’s sister, bringing the friends even closer together.

In 1833, while still in Lincolnshire, Tennyson published his second book of poetry, which notably included the first version of ‘The Lady of Shalott’. This volume was met with so much criticism that Tennyson did not publish again for ten years. 1833 was also the year of Hallam’s sudden death, which had profound impacts on Tennyson and inspired many of his poems. These included ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’, published in 1850 and said to be Tennyson’s magnum opus. The speaker aims to find:

“Every pleasant spot

In which we two were wont to meet,

The field, the chamber, and the street,

For all is dark where thou art not.”

Hallam, once a Cambridge friend, became so interwoven with Tennyson’s other life in Lincolnshire, that the locations of ‘field’, ‘chamber’, and ‘street’ could be applicable to either location. Hallam was not only a friend during Tennyson’s time at university, but he became a friend for life, with the time at Cambridge being referred to as ‘some pleasure from thine early years’. Although tainted by grief, Tennyson focuses on the ‘pleasure’, or the ‘pleasant spots’ – the endearing memories and marks left – from a relationship that was birthed out of Cambridge.

“Though so different in spirit, they became the twin roots of his poetry: one grounding him in the land that shaped his voice, the other in the friendship that shaped his soul”

The ending two lines draw together Tennyson’s perspective on grief: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all.’ Although Cambridge began a relationship that would end so painfully, he would rather it be that way than to have experienced those formative years without Hallam at all.

Now, as I trace the same journey that once shaped Tennyson – from the quiet fields of Lincolnshire to the stone walls of Cambridge – I feel the enduring pull of both places. Though so different in spirit, they became the twin roots of his poetry: one grounding him in the land that shaped his voice, the other in the friendship that shaped his soul. Cambridge, for Tennyson, was a place of friendship, loss, and discovery. Though he left without a degree, he departed with something far more powerful – the insight and emotion that would define him as the poet we know today.