Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the sixth of eleven children of a clergyman. After a childhood marked by trauma, he went up to Cambridge in 1828, where he met Arthur Hallam, whose premature death had a lasting influence on Tennyson's life and writing. His two volumes of Poems (1842) established him as the leading poet of his generation, and of the Victorian period. He was created Poet Laureate in 1850 and in 1883 accepted a peerage. Mick Imlah was born in 1956 and brought up near Glasgow and in Kent. He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he taught as a Junior Fellow. He was editor of Poetry Review from 1983 to 1986, and worked at the Times Literary Supplement from 1992. His poems appeared in The Zoologist's Bath (1982), Birthmarks (1988), Penguin New Poets 3 (1994) and Diehard (2006). He edited The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (with Robert Crawford, 2000) and made selections for Faber of the poems of Tennyson and Edwin Muir. He died in 2009.

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