Uncharted Depths: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself was known as a divided soul. He produced a verse named The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of the poet debated the merits of self-destruction. Within this insightful book, the author decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: 1850
The year 1850 became decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly two decades. Consequently, he became both renowned and prosperous. He entered matrimony, following a 14‑year relationship. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or living alone in a rundown cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Now he moved into a house where he could receive prominent callers. He became the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome
Family Struggles
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting inclined to temperament and depression. His father, a hesitant priest, was irate and very often drunk. There was an event, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a mental institution as a youth and lived there for life. Another experienced deep melancholy and followed his father into drinking. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he was one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive. Even before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – three brothers to an attic room – as an adult he sought out isolation, retreating into stillness when in company, retreating for lonely excursions.
Philosophical Fears and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the evolution, were raising disturbing queries. If the history of existence had started millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the world had been created for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely made for mankind, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The new optical instruments and microscopes revealed spaces vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, given such proof, in a God who had made humanity in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then could the mankind meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The biographer weaves his account together with two recurring elements. The initial he presents initially – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line verse presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, unutterable and mournful, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of rhythm and as the author of symbols in which dreadful unknown is packed into a few brilliantly evocative words.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a thank-you letter in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, hand and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent absurdity of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, 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, multiple birds and a wren” built their homes.
