The Vast Unknown: Examining Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided soul. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, in which contrasting aspects of his personality debated the merits of ending his life. Through this insightful volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 became crucial for Alfred. He published the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for nearly twenty years. As a result, he grew both renowned and rich. He wed, following a extended engagement. Previously, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or residing alone in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he took a house where he could host notable guests. He was appointed the official poet. His life as a Great Man commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Ancestral Struggles
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was irate and regularly drunk. Transpired an event, the facts of which are vague, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a mental institution as a boy and stayed there for life. Another endured profound depression and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced periods of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a room. But, maturing crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he desired isolation, retreating into silence when in groups, retreating for solitary journeys.
Philosophical Fears and Upheaval of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising appalling questions. If the history of life on Earth had begun eons before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the world had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for humanity, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The recent telescopes and microscopes uncovered areas immensely huge and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, given such evidence, in a God who had made humanity in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the mankind meet the same fate?
Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The biographer weaves his account together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, indescribable and sad, submerged beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the author of images in which dreadful enigma is compressed into a few dazzlingly indicative phrases.
The second element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves resting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “two owls and a hen, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their homes.
