Several poets were able to reach into the depths of their minds and pull out something fantastical that no one else can ever fathom. The epitome of this is the Victorian poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson. His early childhood disturbances were the main cause of his works being so heavily involved in dreams and insanity. The works of Alfred Lord Tennyson were based upon the phantasmal world that he lived in to inspire him due to his traumatic life.
The history of the Tennyson family has a long line of mental illness. When Alfred was young, his father was dealing with alcoholism, drug abuse and epilepsy, which also brought upon fits of violence. Throughout his entire life Alfred was plagued by what was thought to be epilepsy, and strange trances. The "black blood" of the Tennysons had an effect on all of his siblings. One brother was confined to a mental asylum most of his life, another a addiction to drugs, another was confined to a mental home for alcoholism, another confined and died young, and the rest of the eleven siblings suffered at least one mental breakdown each. Although Tennyson was plagued by several problems, it certainly contributed to the quality of his work. "Yet there are evidences enough that, even during the years of his greatest prestige as Victorian man of letters, Tennyson held .
aloof from his age and continued to live most intensely within the world of his own mind," (Johnson). .
One of the underlying factors in Tennyson's poetry are dreams and the detachment of reality. In the "Lover's Tale", the poet speaks of "delicious dreams, our other life" and another poem states "dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?" As early as the fourth poem of "In Memoriam", Tennyson introduces a concept of sleep as the sponsor of emotive being in contrast to the activities of the mind. His poems show knowledge of dream psychology unique in the period, and such as could only have been acquired through auto analysis.