The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a torn spirit. He even composed a verse titled The Two Voices, where two versions of the poet contemplated the arguments of suicide. In this revealing book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
The year 1850 proved to be crucial for Alfred. He published the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly a long period. Consequently, he became both famous and wealthy. He wed, after a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or staying alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Now he acquired a residence where he could host distinguished visitors. He became the national poet. His life as a Great Man commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, messy but attractive
Family Challenges
His family, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating susceptible to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was angry and regularly inebriated. There was an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured severe melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming gloom and what he called “weird seizures”. His Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one personally.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could command a space. But, having grown up in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired isolation, retreating into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for solitary walking tours.
Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, celestial observers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Darwin about the origin of species, were raising appalling questions. If the history of living beings had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was only formed for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and microscopes uncovered areas infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s faith, considering such evidence, in a deity who had formed humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then might the human race do so too?
Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship
The biographer weaves his story together with a pair of persistent motifs. The initial he presents early on – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the brief verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged inaccessible of investigation, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of symbols in which terrible mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The second motif is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a grateful note in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a beard in which “two owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a wren” made their dwellings.
