The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided spirit. He even composed a verse called The Two Voices, in which dual facets of his personality debated the merits of self-destruction. Through this revealing book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the overlooked character of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 was pivotal for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to a long period. Therefore, he became both famous and wealthy. He got married, after a 14‑year relationship. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or living alone in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. At that point he took a residence where he could host prominent guests. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, messy but handsome
Family Struggles
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and sadness. His father, a hesitant priest, was irate and very often inebriated. Transpired an event, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for life. Another experienced profound melancholy and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming despair and what he called “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he was one personally.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he desired isolation, retreating into quiet when in social settings, disappearing for individual walking tours.
Deep Anxieties and Upheaval of Conviction
In that period, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing appalling inquiries. If the timeline of existence had started eons before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the earth had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for humanity, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and magnifying tools revealed areas infinitely large and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a divine being who had created man in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then could the human race follow suit?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer ties his narrative together with two recurrent elements. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and sad, submerged out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of rhythm and as the author of symbols in which awful mystery is condensed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.
The additional motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional creature symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his garden with his pet birds perching all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, wrist and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a hen, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their nests.
