The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted spirit. He famously wrote a verse called The Two Voices, where dual aspects of himself contemplated the pros and cons of suicide. In this insightful work, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 was crucial for Alfred. He unveiled the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had worked for nearly two decades. Consequently, he became both renowned and prosperous. He wed, after a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. At that point he acquired a home where he could receive prominent guests. He became the official poet. His existence as a Great Man began.
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, messy but attractive
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to temperament and depression. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was volatile and very often drunk. There was an event, the details of which are unclear, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured profound depression and followed his father into addiction. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he was one personally.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an small space – as an grown man he desired isolation, retreating into silence when in groups, vanishing for lonely excursions.
Deep Anxieties and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, star gazers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing appalling questions. If the story of life on Earth had begun ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and magnifying tools uncovered spaces infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such evidence, in a divine being who had created man in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then might the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The author binds his narrative together with dual recurring elements. The initial he introduces early on – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short poem presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something enormous, unspeakable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, wrote a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of joy nicely suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent nonsense of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their nests.
