Uncharted Depths: Exploring Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself existed as a divided spirit. He even composed a poem titled The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of the poet argued the merits of suicide. In this insightful volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 became crucial for Tennyson. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to two decades. Therefore, he became both famous and prosperous. He got married, following a extended courtship. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a ramshackle cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he acquired a residence where he could host prominent guests. He became the national poet. His career as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to temperament and sadness. His father, a hesitant clergyman, was volatile and very often inebriated. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for life. Another experienced deep melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself endured periods of debilitating sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he could become one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, even glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive. Before he started wearing a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an adult he craved isolation, retreating into quiet when in social settings, disappearing for lonely journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Conviction
During his era, rock experts, celestial observers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing frightening questions. If the story of living beings had commenced millions of years before the arrival of the humanity, then how to believe that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for mankind, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and microscopes uncovered areas infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s religion, given such proof, in a deity who had made mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then might the human race do so too?
Recurrent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Bond
The biographer binds his account together with dual recurring motifs. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged out of reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of metre and as the author of symbols in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.
The other motif is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.
