The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years

The poet Tennyson existed as a divided soul. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, in which two facets of his personality contemplated the arguments of self-destruction. Through this insightful work, the author elects to spotlight on the overlooked identity of the writer.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

During 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both famous and rich. He wed, following a extended courtship. Before that, he had been residing in rented homes with his relatives, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Then he moved into a residence where he could host prominent visitors. He became the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual began.

From his teens he was imposing, even magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive

Family Turmoil

His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was angry and frequently inebriated. There was an event, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep melancholy and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself endured bouts of paralysing despair and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

From his teens he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive. Even before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he craved solitude, withdrawing into silence when in social settings, disappearing for lonely walking tours.

Existential Fears and Turmoil of Belief

During his era, earth scientists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were posing appalling queries. If the history of living beings had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to maintain that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply formed for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The recent viewing devices and microscopes revealed realms infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, in light of such proof, in a God who had made man in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the mankind follow suit?

Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Companionship

The author ties his account together with a pair of recurrent elements. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem presents themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, indescribable and tragic, hidden beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of rhythm and as the author of symbols in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.

The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in verse describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on back, wrist and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of joy nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “two owls and a fowl, four larks and a wren” constructed their homes.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|