The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a poem named The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of himself argued the merits of self-destruction. Within this illuminating book, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the poet.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for Alfred. He published the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to twenty years. Consequently, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended relationship. Before that, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his relatives, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or residing by himself in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he moved into a home where he could entertain distinguished guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His career as a renowned figure began.
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His parent, a hesitant clergyman, was irate and regularly intoxicated. Occurred an occurrence, the facts of which are vague, that caused the household servant being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and stayed there for his entire existence. Another experienced profound depression and followed his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of overwhelming sadness and what he called “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 Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he sought out privacy, withdrawing into quiet when in company, disappearing for individual journeys.
Philosophical Fears and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing appalling questions. If the history of existence had started eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed spaces immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a God who had formed humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then could the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Bond
The author ties his narrative together with two persistent elements. The initial he presents initially – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short sonnet introduces concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and sad, submerged inaccessible of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of metre and as the creator of metaphors in which awful unknown is packed into a few brilliantly indicative words.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the mythical creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic lines with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” built their dwellings.
