Uncharted Depths: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a torn individual. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, in which dual versions of his personality argued the arguments of suicide. Within this illuminating book, the biographer elects to spotlight on the overlooked character of the poet.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 was pivotal for Alfred. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had worked for nearly two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both renowned and rich. He got married, following a long courtship. Previously, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown house on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he took a home where he could host distinguished visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His life as a Great Man began.
From his teens he was commanding, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking
Family Struggles
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His father, a unwilling priest, was angry and frequently drunk. There was an incident, the details of which are obscure, that led to the domestic worker being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for life. Another suffered from profound melancholy and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming sadness and what he called “strange episodes”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must regularly have pondered whether he was one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, being raised crowded with his family members – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he sought out solitude, withdrawing into silence when in social settings, disappearing for lonely journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Faith
In that period, rock experts, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing disturbing inquiries. If the story of existence had started eons before the arrival of the humanity, then how to hold that the world had been created for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely made for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The new telescopes and microscopes revealed areas infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s religion, given such evidence, in a God who had made mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then would the humanity do so too?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer weaves his story together with a pair of persistent elements. The primary he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short sonnet presents concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and sad, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the originator of symbols in which awful mystery is packed into a few strikingly suggestive words.
The other motif is the counterpart. Where the fictional creature represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in verse describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, wrist and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.
