The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself existed as a divided individual. He famously wrote a poem named The Two Voices, wherein contrasting facets of the poet debated the pros and cons of suicide. In this insightful book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the overlooked identity of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: 1850
In the year 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to two decades. Therefore, he grew both famous and rich. He wed, after a extended engagement. Before that, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he acquired a house where he could receive notable callers. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual began.
From his teens he was imposing, even glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking
Family Struggles
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning prone to temperament and depression. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and frequently drunk. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured deep despair and emulated his father into addiction. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of debilitating sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he was one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired isolation, retreating into stillness when in company, disappearing for solitary walking tours.
Philosophical Fears and Upheaval of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing disturbing inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely formed for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent viewing devices and lenses exposed spaces infinitely large and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s faith, given such evidence, in a God who had made mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then could the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Companionship
The biographer binds his story together with two recurring themes. The primary he introduces early on – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, concealed inaccessible of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of verse and as the creator of images in which terrible enigma is compressed into a few brilliantly evocative words.
The other element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in rhyme describing him in his flower bed with his tame doves resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” built their homes.
