Arnold Markley is a freelance writer who has contributed essays and reviews to Approaches to Teaching D. H. Lawrence's Fiction and The Journal of the History of Sexuality. He is currently an Assistant Professor in English at Penn State University, Media, PA. In the following essay, Markley surveys the historical events that inspired "The Charge of the Light Brigade, " reviews its publication and initial reception, and discusses Tennyson's effective use of sound and imagery in the poem.

One of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's best known poems, and indeed one of the most famous war poems of all times, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," immortalizes an important military incident in British history. In the mid-1850s, England became involved in the Crimean War, a struggle with Russia over control of the Crimean peninsula, a peninsula in the southwest Ukraine that extends into the Black Sea. On October 25, 1854, the...