What is the Victorian crisis as reflected in Tennyson's poetry.

A very good question indeed.

In the Victorian era, there was a huge conflict occurred especially because of Darwin's theory between science and religion. Darwin suggested that humans are actually originated from the apes. This struck the Orthodox, and moved the faith of people in religion. Besides, the industrial revolution caused rapid growth of factories, mills, industries, and people began to yield to mammon while capitalism enveloped spirituality. Human race became calculating and materialistic. Science brought new inventions and these inventions, while doing good to humans, but also, were making them more mechanized. They were more interested in business than religion, were busy in working and making money.

This conflict between science and religion is wonderfully depicted in the poems of those poets who were extremely worried because of the conflict, Matthew Arnold is one of those. Poets like Arnold of nineteenth century started to hold a very pessimistic view about the Victorian crisis, and in almost all his poems, he seems to express only a negative attitude toward his contemporary age. But we see a quite dissimilar attitude in the poems of his most renowned contemporary, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Unlike Arnold, he expressed a compromising attitude to his age and its intricate problems. Tennyson, we find, in his Ulysses, The Lotos Eaters, The Charge of the Light Brigade, holds such a sort of view which is supposed to find a middle ground. He is neither too melancholic like Arnold nor too optimistic like Robert Browning, another contemporary, in terms of the tone, mood and theme of his poetry. He tries to portray in his poems a real and clear picture of the problems of contemporary age in an implicit way, and then shows a positivity or a ray of hope at the end of almost all his poems. In fact the poem 'the Charge of the Light Brigade' which is based upon the Crimean War, describes the marvelous courage of the British soldiers and pays homage to them.

In fact, the frequent use of myths in many of his poems proves that, Tennyson believed not to stagnate in a melancholic state. Rather through going back to classical myths, he is trying at least to find a sort of solution to some extents.

Because of the quality to look for a middle ground, Tennyson is considered as a compromising craftsman who does neither yield to the crisis of his age nor possess a carefree attitude towards the problems, rather keeps compromising and finding a solution.