The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, where two facets of his personality debated the pros and cons of ending his life. In this illuminating work, the author chooses to focus on the overlooked identity of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be crucial for the poet. He released the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for nearly twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He got married, following a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he took a residence where he could receive distinguished guests. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning prone to temperament and sadness. His father, a unwilling minister, was volatile and regularly intoxicated. There was an event, the facts of which are unclear, that resulted in the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced severe melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a room. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his family members – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he craved isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in groups, retreating for lonely journeys.
Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Conviction
In that period, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing frightening questions. If the history of living beings had started millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the world had been created for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for us, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The new optical instruments and microscopes uncovered areas infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s belief, given such findings, in a God who had formed humanity in his form? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the mankind do so too?
Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Friendship
Holmes weaves his story together with a pair of recurrent elements. The first he introduces initially – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line verse presents themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, unspeakable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the originator of images in which terrible mystery is packed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.
The second theme is the contrast. Where the fictional creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in verse depicting him in his garden with his tame doves perching all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant foolishness of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” made their nests.
