Uncharted Depths: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted soul. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, in which two aspects of himself argued the pros and cons of suicide. In this insightful volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known identity of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 was crucial for the poet. He published the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for nearly two decades. Therefore, he grew both celebrated and rich. He got married, following a long relationship. Before that, he had been residing in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying alone in a rundown dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. At that point he acquired a residence where he could host prominent callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a Great Man started.
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive
Family Turmoil
His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and frequently intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for life. Another endured profound melancholy and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating gloom and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Even before he adopted a dark cloak and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he sought out isolation, withdrawing into silence when in social settings, vanishing for lonely journeys.
Philosophical Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing appalling questions. If the story of living beings had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply created for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent viewing devices and microscopes revealed spaces infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s faith, considering such evidence, in a God who had formed humanity in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the humanity do so too?
Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Friendship
The biographer ties his account together with a pair of recurring themes. The first he establishes early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the brief poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and tragic, concealed inaccessible of investigation, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the originator of images in which awful mystery is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive lines.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry describing him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” made their homes.
