The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a piece named The Two Voices, in which contrasting versions of his personality argued the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this revealing book, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for nearly twenty years. Consequently, he grew both famous and prosperous. He wed, following a extended relationship. Previously, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying alone in a dilapidated house on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Now he took a residence where he could entertain prominent visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His existence as a renowned figure commenced.
From his teens he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Struggles
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was angry and frequently inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the household servant being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep melancholy and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is told by a insane person: he must regularly have pondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking. Before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a room. But, maturing in close quarters with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he craved solitude, retreating into quiet when in groups, disappearing for lonely journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Upheaval of Conviction
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the evolution, were raising appalling questions. If the story of existence had started ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for mankind, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The new viewing devices and magnifying tools exposed areas immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s faith, given such findings, in a deity who had formed man in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the humanity do so too?
Persistent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The biographer ties his narrative together with two recurrent elements. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something enormous, unutterable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of symbols in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive lines.
The additional theme is the contrast. Where the fictional creature symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great celebration of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.
