The Vast Unknown: Delving into Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted individual. He produced a poem titled The Two Voices, in which dual facets of the poet contemplated the merits of ending his life. Through this revealing work, the biographer chooses to focus on the overlooked persona of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 was crucial for the poet. He published the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for almost twenty years. Consequently, he grew both celebrated and prosperous. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been residing in rented homes with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or staying by himself in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. At that point he took a home where he could receive prominent visitors. He became the national poet. His career as a Great Man started.
From his teens he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking
Family Challenges
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and regularly drunk. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured profound despair and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured periods of debilitating gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have questioned whether he could become one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he adopted a dark cloak and headwear, he could control a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his siblings – several relatives to an small space – as an grown man he desired solitude, retreating into stillness when in company, disappearing for lonely excursions.
Deep Anxieties and Crisis of Belief
During his era, earth scientists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing appalling inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had begun ages before the arrival of the humanity, then how to hold that the world had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The recent telescopes and magnifying tools exposed realms vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had made man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then could the human race meet the same fate?
Persistent Motifs: Kraken and Bond
Holmes binds his account together with two recurrent themes. The first he establishes initially – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the brief sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of metre and as the author of images in which terrible enigma is packed into a few strikingly indicative lines.
The additional motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a thank-you letter in verse describing him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of joy excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great celebration of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a hen, several songbirds and a tiny creature” built their homes.
