He radically revised the poem when he published it a year later in July 1855 in a collection with the longer and more substantial poem 'Maud: A Monodrama,' a work in which the speaker expresses exaggerated admiration for the Crimean War. He sent it to The Examiner (London), where it was published the next week.

It took Tennyson less than an hour to write the poem on December 2, 1854. In 'The Historical Abuse of Literature: Tennyson's Maud: A Monodrama and the Crimean War,' literary historian James Bennett points out that we know 'almost nothing' of what Tennyson thought of the war thus our ideas regarding 'what Tennyson thought about the Crimean War must be purely conjectural.'

The most famous lines quoted above celebrate military bravery while simultaneously suggesting that soldiers function as machines sent to fulfill orders and face inevitable death. Tennyson's poem has most often been read as a patriotic tribute to the military, but its context and content are much more ambiguous. Reports on the sesquicentennial commemoration of the charge on October 25, 2004, cited Tennyson's poem as the catalyst for people's cultural memory of the event. The popularity of the poem would lead to several visual dramatizations of the charge in the twentieth century, including films, documentaries, and reenactments of the event. Still, however slight it may be, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' created a legend that would affect future poets and writers including Rudyard Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon, and Virginia Woolf. H.' (1850), 'Maud: A Monodrama' (1855), or the twelve poems that make up his Idylls of the King (1859–85). 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' is one of Tennyson's most famous poems, but it does not compare in terms of length or ambition to his more critically acclaimed works such as 'In Memoriam, A. War correspondent William Howard Russell, in particular, caught Tennyson's attention with his dramatic and sensational narrative of the charge of the Light Brigade, which moved Tennyson to write the legendary poem. However, both British and French civilians experienced the events of the war vicariously, through eyewitness accounts of battles published in their newspapers. Tens of thousands of soldiers died during the Crimean War (most of them from disease), but fewer than two hundred were killed in the charge that the poem describes. Some historians wonder why this event has become so famous. This incident is commonly acknowledged as one of the most catastrophic moments in military history. The poem was inspired by an event that occurred on October 25, 1854, during the Crimean War: the attack by the British Light Cavalry Brigade-a force of fewer than seven hundred men-against more than twenty-five thousand Russian soldiers. The poem is the original source of the famous lines: 'Their's not to make reply, / Their's not to reason why, / Their's but to do and die,' and is often cited as the quintessential tribute to soldiers fighting in any war.

'The Charge of the Light Brigade' ALFRED TENNYSON 1854 INTRODUCTION POEM SUMMARY THEMES HISTORICAL OVERVIEW CRITICAL OVERVIEW CRITICISM SOURCES INTRODUCTIONĪlfred, Lord Tennyson's poem 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' is one of the most frequently quoted and most controversial poems of the nineteenth century.

Forward the light brigade poem