🔗 Share this article

Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He even composed a verse titled The Two Voices, where dual aspects of the poet argued the arguments of self-destruction. Through this revealing work, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.

A Critical Year: That Fateful Year

In the year 1850 was decisive for the poet. He released the great poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had worked for almost a long period. Therefore, he grew both celebrated and rich. He wed, subsequent to a long relationship. Before that, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he moved into a residence where he could receive distinguished visitors. He became the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual started.

From his teens he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive

Family Struggles

His family, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His father, a unwilling minister, was irate and frequently inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced severe melancholy and followed his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he desired privacy, escaping into quiet when in social settings, vanishing for individual journeys.

Philosophical Concerns and Upheaval of Conviction

In that period, geologists, astronomers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising frightening questions. If the history of existence had commenced ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply made for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and microscopes uncovered spaces infinitely large and organisms minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a deity who had formed mankind in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then could the humanity do so too?

Repeating Motifs: Mythical Beast and Companionship

The biographer weaves his narrative together with two recurring themes. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the short verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, hidden inaccessible of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of metre and as the originator of images in which awful mystery is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.

The other motif is the contrast. Where the fictional beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is affectionate and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a grateful note in verse describing him in his garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, hand and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of joy perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a hen, several songbirds and a tiny creature” built their dwellings.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|