The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He even composed a poem titled The Two Voices, wherein contrasting aspects of the poet debated the merits of ending his life. Through this illuminating volume, the biographer chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 was pivotal for Alfred. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost a long period. As a result, he grew both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, after a long relationship. Before that, he had been residing in rented homes with his family members, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he acquired a house where he could host distinguished visitors. He became poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual began.
From his teens he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Ancestral Turmoil
His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to temperament and sadness. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and frequently intoxicated. Transpired an event, the details of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for life. Another endured deep melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing sadness and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have pondered whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a room. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he craved solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in social settings, retreating for solitary walking tours.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Conviction
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising disturbing questions. If the timeline of existence had started ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the world had been created for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The recent viewing devices and microscopes exposed spaces immensely huge and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s belief, given such proof, in a divine being who had formed mankind in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then would the mankind do so too?
Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Bond
Holmes weaves his account together with a pair of recurrent themes. The primary he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, hidden out of reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the originator of metaphors in which awful mystery is condensed into a few strikingly evocative lines.
The additional theme is the contrast. Where the mythical beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is loving and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.