The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a divided soul. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, where two aspects of the poet debated the arguments of suicide. In this revealing book, the author decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 was pivotal for the poet. He released the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for close to a long period. Therefore, he grew both celebrated and prosperous. He got married, subsequent to a long courtship. Before that, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or living by himself in a rundown house on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. At that point he acquired a house where he could host distinguished callers. He was appointed the official poet. His career as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive
Family Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to temperament and depression. His father, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and regularly drunk. Occurred an event, the details of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a boy and lived there for life. Another experienced severe despair and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced periods of paralysing despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have pondered whether he could become one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings – three brothers to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved solitude, escaping into silence when in groups, disappearing for individual journeys.
Deep Concerns and Upheaval of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing appalling questions. If the timeline of existence had begun millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply made for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and microscopes revealed spaces immensely huge and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s faith, in light of such proof, in a deity who had formed mankind in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the human race meet the same fate?
Repeating Themes: Kraken and Bond
The biographer weaves his story together with a pair of recurring elements. The primary he introduces initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the brief sonnet presents themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and sad, submerged out of reach of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a master of rhythm and as the creator of images in which terrible enigma is compressed into a few dazzlingly suggestive lines.
The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a grateful note in poetry describing him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, hand and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of delight perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent nonsense of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a wren” constructed their dwellings.
