The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Restless Years

Tennyson himself existed as a torn spirit. He famously wrote a verse named The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of the poet argued the arguments of self-destruction. Within this illuminating work, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

The year 1850 became crucial for Tennyson. He published the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for almost a long period. As a result, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, after a long relationship. Before that, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing alone in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he acquired a residence where he could host distinguished visitors. He became the official poet. His existence as a renowned figure started.

Even as a youth he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome

Lineage Struggles

The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to temperament and depression. His parent, a reluctant priest, was irate and frequently inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the particulars of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another suffered from deep despair and followed his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of paralysing gloom and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one himself.

The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson

Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could control a space. But, being raised crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he desired solitude, withdrawing into quiet when in company, disappearing for individual journeys.

Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Faith

During his era, earth scientists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing frightening questions. If the story of existence had started ages before the appearance of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely made for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new optical instruments and lenses uncovered areas infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a deity who had formed humanity in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then could the human race meet the same fate?

Recurrent Elements: Sea Monster and Bond

Holmes binds his account together with dual recurring motifs. The initial he presents early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the brief sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something vast, unutterable and tragic, concealed out of reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of verse and as the originator of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is condensed into a few brilliantly suggestive lines.

The other element is the contrast. Where the mythical creature epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in verse depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of pleasure nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a small bird” made their homes.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|