The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself was known as a divided soul. He produced a piece titled The Two Voices, in which contrasting aspects of the poet argued the pros and cons of self-destruction. Through this insightful work, the author decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
During 1850 became pivotal for Tennyson. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for almost twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year engagement. Earlier, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living by himself in a rundown house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Now he moved into a residence where he could host distinguished visitors. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a Great Man began.
Even as a youth he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Struggles
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling priest, was volatile and regularly intoxicated. There was an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the household servant being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a lunatic asylum as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another endured severe depression and emulated his father into addiction. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming despair and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he desired solitude, withdrawing into quiet when in company, vanishing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief
During his era, earth scientists, star gazers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were raising disturbing questions. If the timeline of living beings had begun millions of years before the arrival of the humanity, then how to maintain that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only created for humanity, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The recent viewing devices and microscopes uncovered realms infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s religion, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had created mankind in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then could the mankind meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Bond
The biographer weaves his story together with dual recurrent motifs. The initial he presents early on – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line poem introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something vast, indescribable and mournful, hidden beyond reach of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which awful enigma is condensed into a few dazzlingly evocative words.
The second element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in verse describing him in his flower bed with his tame doves sitting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on back, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, several songbirds and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.
