The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a torn individual. He famously wrote a verse called The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of the poet argued the pros and cons of suicide. Through this illuminating volume, the biographer elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 became decisive for Tennyson. He published the great collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly a long period. As a result, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He got married, following a extended relationship. Earlier, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Then he moved into a residence where he could host prominent visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a renowned figure began.
From his teens he was striking, even charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking
Ancestral Turmoil
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating inclined to temperament and melancholy. His parent, a reluctant priest, was volatile and very often drunk. There was an event, the facts of which are vague, that resulted in the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured severe melancholy and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing gloom and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must often have questioned whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was imposing, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a gathering. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an small space – as an mature individual he sought out privacy, withdrawing into quiet when in company, vanishing for solitary excursions.
Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Conviction
During his era, earth scientists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the origin of species, were introducing disturbing questions. If the story of existence had started millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the planet had been made for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The new telescopes and microscopes uncovered realms immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s religion, considering such evidence, in a deity who had formed mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the mankind meet the same fate?
Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship
The biographer weaves his account together with a pair of persistent motifs. The first he introduces initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line poem establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, indescribable and sad, submerged beyond reach of investigation, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of verse and as the creator of symbols in which terrible unknown is condensed into a few brilliantly indicative words.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on arm, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of delight perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s great celebration of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their homes.
