The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a piece titled The Two Voices, wherein dual aspects of his personality contemplated the merits of ending his life. Through this insightful book, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for the poet. He unveiled the significant verse series In Memoriam, on which he had worked for almost a long period. Therefore, he became both renowned and rich. He got married, after a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying by himself in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he acquired a home where he could host prominent callers. He was appointed the official poet. His existence as a renowned figure commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating prone to emotional swings and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and very often inebriated. There was an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep depression and followed his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced periods of overwhelming despair and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must often have questioned whether he could become one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was striking, almost glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and headwear, he could dominate a space. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an attic room – as an grown man he craved solitude, escaping into silence when in company, retreating for lonely excursions.
Existential Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising appalling questions. If the timeline of living beings had begun eons before the arrival of the humanity, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply formed for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed spaces vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a divine being who had made humanity in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then could the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The biographer ties his account together with two recurrent motifs. The primary he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, indescribable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of rhythm and as the creator of images in which dreadful enigma is compressed into a few strikingly indicative lines.
The other element is the contrast. Where the mythical creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in rhyme describing him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on arm, hand and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant nonsense of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, several songbirds and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.
