The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, wherein dual facets of himself argued the merits of ending his life. Through this insightful volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked character of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became pivotal for Tennyson. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to twenty years. As a result, he grew both famous and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a long relationship. Earlier, 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 dilapidated dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he took a home where he could receive notable callers. He became the national poet. His life as a renowned figure commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating susceptible to moods and melancholy. His parent, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and very often intoxicated. Occurred an occurrence, the particulars of which are vague, that resulted in the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a mental institution as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from profound depression and followed his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of debilitating gloom and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Even before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a space. But, maturing in close quarters with his siblings – three brothers to an small space – as an grown man he desired solitude, escaping into quiet when in social settings, retreating for solitary excursions.
Existential Concerns and Turmoil of Faith
In that period, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing disturbing queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun ages before the emergence of the mankind, then how to maintain that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely created for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The new optical instruments and magnifying tools uncovered areas infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s belief, in light of such evidence, in a deity who had created mankind in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Friendship
Holmes binds his account together with dual recurrent elements. The first he establishes initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, submerged beyond reach of human inquiry, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of metre and as the originator of metaphors in which awful enigma is condensed into a few strikingly evocative phrases.
The second element is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on back, wrist and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their homes.
