Uncharted Depths: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years

Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided soul. He even composed a poem named The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of himself debated the pros and cons of suicide. In this revealing book, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the more obscure character of the writer.

A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year

During 1850 was pivotal for Tennyson. He unveiled the great collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had worked for close to two decades. As a result, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He wed, subsequent to a extended relationship. Earlier, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a rundown house on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren beaches. At that point he took a residence where he could host notable callers. He was appointed the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual began.

Even as a youth he was imposing, even glamorous. He was of great height, messy but attractive

Ancestral Challenges

The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to emotional swings and depression. His parent, a hesitant priest, was irate and frequently inebriated. Occurred an incident, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for life. Another suffered from profound melancholy and followed his father into addiction. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of paralysing gloom and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must often have wondered whether he was one personally.

The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking. Before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a room. But, being raised in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, escaping into stillness when in company, disappearing for solitary excursions.

Philosophical Fears and Upheaval of Conviction

In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing disturbing queries. If the story of living beings had started millions of years before the emergence of the human race, then how to maintain that the planet had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely made for mankind, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The new telescopes and lenses revealed spaces immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s belief, given such findings, in a God who had created humanity in his form? If dinosaurs had become died out, then could the mankind follow suit?

Repeating Motifs: Sea Monster and Companionship

Holmes ties his story together with dual persistent motifs. The initial he presents early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line poem introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, indescribable and mournful, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which terrible unknown is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.

The other theme is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is fond and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a appreciation message in verse describing him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on arm, hand and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of joy perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant foolishness of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a hen, several songbirds and a tiny creature” made their homes.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|