The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a divided soul. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, in which two aspects of himself argued the pros and cons of suicide. Within this insightful volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked character of the poet.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became crucial for Tennyson. He released the great poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to two decades. Therefore, he became both famous and wealthy. He wed, after a long courtship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Now he took a residence where he could host distinguished visitors. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His career as a renowned figure commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, messy but attractive
Ancestral Struggles
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and depression. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and regularly inebriated. Transpired an event, the details of which are vague, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced severe depression and copied his father into addiction. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced periods of debilitating sadness and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have pondered whether he was one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was very tall, messy but attractive. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – multiple siblings to an small space – as an mature individual he sought out isolation, escaping into quiet when in groups, vanishing for individual excursions.
Deep Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were posing frightening questions. If the history of existence had begun eons before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply formed for us, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The recent telescopes and microscopes exposed spaces infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such evidence, in a God who had made mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then might the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship
The biographer ties his story together with two recurrent elements. The first he presents initially – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, indescribable and sad, concealed beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of images in which terrible enigma is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional creature symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure nicely suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent foolishness of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a hen, four larks and a tiny creature” made their homes.
