The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided soul. He even composed a poem called The Two Voices, where two versions of his personality argued the arguments of self-destruction. Through this insightful book, the biographer decides to concentrate on the lesser known identity of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had worked for nearly two decades. Therefore, he became both renowned and prosperous. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a long courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Then he moved into a home where he could host distinguished visitors. He became the official poet. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome
Lineage Challenges
His family, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating prone to moods and depression. His father, a reluctant priest, was irate and regularly inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a mental institution as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe depression and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of debilitating despair and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His Maud is told by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a room. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an grown man he desired privacy, withdrawing into silence when in company, vanishing for solitary journeys.
Deep Concerns and Turmoil of Faith
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing disturbing questions. If the history of existence had started ages before the emergence of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for mankind, who reside on a minor world of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and microscopes revealed areas immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, given such evidence, in a deity who had created mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the human race meet the same fate?
Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Companionship
The biographer weaves his narrative together with a pair of recurrent elements. The initial he introduces at the beginning – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of rhythm and as the originator of metaphors in which terrible unknown is packed into a few brilliantly evocative words.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is loving and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a thank-you letter in poetry portraying him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of pleasure excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their nests.
