The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, in which dual aspects of the poet contemplated the merits of ending his life. Within this revealing book, the biographer elects to spotlight on the more obscure persona of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: 1850
The year 1850 was crucial for the poet. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had worked for nearly twenty years. As a result, he became both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year engagement. Earlier, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his family members, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a rundown cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak shores. At that point he acquired a home where he could entertain notable guests. He became poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive
Lineage Challenges
His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a hesitant clergyman, was volatile and frequently drunk. There was an incident, the details of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured deep despair and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have pondered whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, having grown up in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an attic room – as an adult he craved solitude, retreating into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for solitary excursions.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the evolution, were raising disturbing inquiries. If the story of existence had commenced eons before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for us, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The recent telescopes and magnifying tools uncovered spaces vast beyond measure and organisms minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, given such proof, in a deity who had made man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the human race follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Bond
Holmes weaves his narrative together with two persistent elements. The initial he establishes initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and tragic, concealed inaccessible of investigation, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a master of metre and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few strikingly evocative words.
The second element is the contrast. Where the fictional creature symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his garden with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of pleasure perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, several songbirds and a small bird” built their homes.
