The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided individual. He even composed a poem named The Two Voices, in which dual aspects of his personality argued the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this revealing volume, the biographer elects to spotlight on the overlooked character of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He published the significant verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly twenty years. Consequently, he emerged as both famous and prosperous. He wed, following a 14‑year engagement. Before that, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Then he acquired a home where he could receive prominent visitors. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a celebrated individual started.
Even as a youth he was commanding, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking
Family Turmoil
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to moods and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant clergyman, was irate and regularly inebriated. There was an event, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured profound depression and followed his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing despair and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a lunatic: he must frequently have questioned whether he could become one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he craved solitude, retreating into silence when in company, disappearing for solitary journeys.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing disturbing inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had begun eons before the appearance of the humanity, then how to maintain that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely created for mankind, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The new viewing devices and magnifying tools uncovered areas vast beyond measure and organisms minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s religion, given such evidence, in a divine being who had made man in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then would the human race follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship
The author ties his story together with a pair of recurring themes. The initial he introduces initially – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the brief sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and mournful, concealed inaccessible of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the originator of images in which awful mystery is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive lines.
The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the fictional creature represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, wrist and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of joy excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant foolishness of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a wren” built their homes.