The Vast Unknown: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a torn soul. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, in which contrasting versions of his personality debated the merits of suicide. In this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked identity of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He unveiled the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had worked for nearly twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He got married, after a 14‑year relationship. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he took a house where he could host notable visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His career as a celebrated individual started.
From his teens he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning prone to temperament and depression. His parent, a hesitant minister, was angry and frequently drunk. Transpired an event, the facts of which are vague, that resulted in the household servant being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and lived there for his entire existence. Another endured profound melancholy and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing sadness and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is voiced by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a space. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he desired privacy, escaping into quiet when in company, vanishing for solitary walking tours.
Deep Anxieties and Upheaval of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing frightening queries. If the story of living beings had begun millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely created for us, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and lenses revealed areas immensely huge and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s faith, given such evidence, in a deity who had made mankind in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the mankind follow suit?
Repeating Elements: Kraken and Bond
The biographer ties his story together with two persistent motifs. The primary he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, indescribable and tragic, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the creator of symbols in which terrible unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The second element is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in poetry portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent foolishness of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their nests.
