Tennyson is the archetypal poet of the Victorian age for several reasons which, taken together, describe his poetic style, including the central themes expressed in his verse.

Like others of his period, Tennyson grapples with the great questions of his era. How, he seems to ask, can one reconcile the enormous changes that are occurring in the nineteenth century with the desire or the need to preserve the legacy of England's, and Europe's, past ? This is the idea behind "Locksley Hall," which is both a prophecy and a warning. Is it possible to

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change

without entailing the destruction of our civilized order? At the same time, can the past, which Tennyson and other artists cherished so much, serve as a mirror of the present?

Tennyson and others of his time were preoccupied with legend and myth precisely because they felt the world was passing them by, that the artistic culture was entering a kind of post-historical age. His style embodies a consistent tone of regret, of loss. Even as a young man Tennyson brooded about death, and wrote of the

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

and the thoughts of a dying one who hears and sees,

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square.

Tennyson seems to have intuitively known that the deaths of elderly people most often occur just at or before dawn. In this solemnly and sadly resigned tone Tennyson expresses the angst of a generation that seemingly lived on the cusp of a great future but simultaneously felt that the world had left them behind. The sense of loss is deepest, unsurprisingly, in his elegy for his friend Arthur Hallam, In Memoriam, A. H. H. Both the obsessive length and the seemingly intentional obscurity of much of the language are similar in character to Robert Browning's early (and notoriously unsuccessful) Sordello, though in general these two contemporaries appear to have little in common. Browning is a true optimist, while Tennyson, if not a pessimist, is hopeful in a melancholy way, paradoxically.

The smooth, polished elegance of Tennyson is a hallmark of his style. This, too, sets him apart from Browning. In his re-thinking of England's legendary past, an antique sort of tone and diction are present but muted:

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky...

The distant mirror of the present extends, in Tennyson's work, not only to Arthurian legend but to the primal myths of Europe in Homer. In "Ulysses" Tennyson sums up both the sense of loss and the willful plunge into an unknown future with a faith that, even if the great accomplishments have been completed, something remains:

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

The controlled, finished style of Tennyson's verse creates a constant tension with the almost painful sense of regret that informs so much of it. The supercharged emotion of the Romantic period was something Tennyson and his contemporaries could never recapture, but Tennyson did not try to, instead creating poetry almost equally poignant on its own terms and expressing a kind of sadness over the fact that he and his contemporaries had been born, as it were, too late.