The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided soul. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, where two aspects of the poet debated the arguments of self-destruction. Through this insightful work, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 proved to be pivotal for the poet. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for almost a long period. Therefore, he grew both celebrated and rich. He got married, subsequent to a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or living alone in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Now he acquired a residence where he could entertain distinguished visitors. He assumed the role of the official poet. His life as a renowned figure started.
From his teens he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and depression. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and frequently inebriated. There was an event, the details of which are vague, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another experienced deep despair and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself experienced episodes of overwhelming sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have pondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a space. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he desired isolation, retreating into silence when in groups, vanishing for lonely excursions.
Philosophical Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising disturbing queries. If the story of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been created for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply formed for mankind, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed realms immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, considering such findings, in a God who had created humanity in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the human race follow suit?
Persistent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The author ties his account together with a pair of recurring themes. The first he establishes early on – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something immense, indescribable and tragic, concealed inaccessible of human inquiry, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of verse and as the originator of symbols in which awful enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly suggestive phrases.
The second element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a small bird” built their nests.
