"The Kraken" is a sonnet by Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) that describes the Kraken, a mythical creature. It was published in Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830).
The critic Christopher Ricks writes that it is among the best poems in the volume, all of which originate in Tennyson’s "despondency".[1] In “The Kraken," writes Robert Preyer, a "very early work, one already sees a magnificent matching of the various technical components to secure an effect that is intense, strange, remote, and curiously suggestive and impersonal."[2]
The Kraken and the poem have been widely referenced in popular culture.