The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, in which dual versions of the poet argued the pros and cons of suicide. Within this revealing volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked character of the writer.
A Defining Year: 1850
The year 1850 was decisive for Alfred. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for almost twenty years. As a result, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a long engagement. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren coasts. At that point he took a residence where he could receive distinguished guests. He was appointed the national poet. His existence as a renowned figure started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome
Family Turmoil
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a hesitant clergyman, was irate and frequently intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from profound depression and followed his father into addiction. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of paralysing gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have questioned whether he could become one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he desired solitude, retreating into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing appalling inquiries. If the timeline of existence had commenced millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for humanity, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The modern viewing devices and magnifying tools revealed areas vast beyond measure and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s faith, given such evidence, in a divine being who had formed mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then could the mankind do so too?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship
Holmes weaves his account together with dual persistent motifs. The initial he establishes early on – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and sad, submerged beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which terrible unknown is packed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.
The other element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is loving and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a thank-you letter in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” made their dwellings.
