The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself existed as a torn individual. He even composed a poem called The Two Voices, where two aspects of himself argued the arguments of suicide. Within this insightful volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known character of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for nearly two decades. Therefore, he grew both renowned and prosperous. He wed, following a 14‑year relationship. Earlier, he had been residing in rented homes with his family members, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying by himself in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he acquired a home where he could host notable callers. He became poet laureate. His career as a Great Man started.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, messy but handsome
Ancestral Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning inclined to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was volatile and very often inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced severe despair and copied his father into drinking. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating sadness and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he was one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive. Prior to he started wearing a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a room. But, maturing crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he craved isolation, retreating into silence when in groups, disappearing for lonely excursions.
Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising frightening questions. If the timeline of living beings had commenced millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been formed 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 optical instruments and microscopes exposed areas infinitely large and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such proof, in a God who had made humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then might the mankind meet the same fate?
Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Companionship
The biographer binds his account together with a pair of recurring motifs. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, concealed out of reach of investigation, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a master of metre and as the creator of symbols in which awful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.
The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves resting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an image of joy nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” made their homes.