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Alfred Tennyson was known as a torn spirit. He even composed a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein contrasting aspects of himself debated the merits of self-destruction. Within this illuminating work, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the more obscure persona of the literary figure.

A Critical Year: That Fateful Year

During 1850 proved to be decisive for Tennyson. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for nearly two decades. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and rich. He got married, following a extended relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or living in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he took a home where he could receive prominent guests. He was appointed the national poet. His existence as a renowned figure started.

From his teens he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking

Ancestral Struggles

The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to moods and melancholy. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was angry and frequently drunk. Occurred an incident, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating gloom and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His work Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

From his teens he was striking, almost glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could command a space. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an small space – as an grown man he desired privacy, retreating into stillness when in company, retreating for lonely journeys.

Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Faith

In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising frightening queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for mankind, who reside on a minor world of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and microscopes revealed spaces immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had formed mankind in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the human race do so too?

Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Friendship

The biographer ties his story together with two persistent elements. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse presents themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and mournful, concealed inaccessible of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of images in which awful enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly suggestive lines.

The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional beast symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of pleasure excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a wren” made their homes.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|