The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted soul. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, where contrasting aspects of himself debated the merits of ending his life. In this revealing volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
In the year 1850 became crucial for Tennyson. He published the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for almost two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both famous and prosperous. He got married, subsequent to a long engagement. Before that, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living alone in a dilapidated cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. At that point he moved into a house where he could host distinguished callers. He assumed the role of the national poet. His career as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome
Family Turmoil
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was irate and very often inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced profound depression and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming gloom and what he called “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking. Before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a room. But, being raised crowded with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an grown man he sought out privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in social settings, retreating for solitary excursions.
Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening queries. If the timeline of existence had started ages before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the earth had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The new optical instruments and magnifying tools uncovered spaces vast beyond measure and organisms minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s religion, given such findings, in a divine being who had made man in his form? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the humanity follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Friendship
Holmes weaves his story together with dual persistent motifs. The first he introduces initially – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem presents concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and sad, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the originator of images in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few strikingly indicative words.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his garden with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of joy perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent nonsense of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” made their nests.
