🔗 Share this article

Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a poem titled The Two Voices, wherein two versions of himself debated the arguments of ending his life. Within this insightful volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the lesser known character of the literary figure.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

The year 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for nearly two decades. Therefore, he became both celebrated and prosperous. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended courtship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his family members, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Now he acquired a house where he could host notable visitors. He became the national poet. His existence as a Great Man began.

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive

Ancestral Struggles

The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was irate and very often intoxicated. There was an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a mental institution as a boy and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of overwhelming sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he was one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking. Before he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a room. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – three brothers to an attic room – as an grown man he craved privacy, retreating into quiet when in social settings, disappearing for individual journeys.

Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Faith

In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising appalling queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had started ages before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been made for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply made for us, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The new viewing devices and magnifying tools exposed spaces vast beyond measure and beings tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s faith, given such evidence, in a divine being who had made man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the human race meet the same fate?

Recurrent Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship

Holmes binds his story together with dual recurrent elements. The first he introduces early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short verse introduces ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the originator of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.

The second theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is fond and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a wren” built their dwellings.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|