Although Tennyson (1809-1892) has often seemed to personify the Victorian Age, he was a poet before it began and his poems endure to speak clearly to this modern one. His mastery of a great variety of poetic forms and moods enables him to communicate such extremes of feeling as calm despair and wild unrest; rapturous love: the soul of the rose went into my blood; and noble resolve:
One equal temper of heroic hearts / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.