Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself existed as a divided individual. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, where two versions of the poet contemplated the merits of self-destruction. In this illuminating book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: 1850
During 1850 was crucial for Alfred. He unveiled the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had worked for nearly a long period. As a result, he emerged as both celebrated and prosperous. He entered matrimony, following a extended relationship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or staying by himself in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak shores. At that point he took a residence where he could host distinguished guests. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive
Family Challenges
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning prone to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was angry and regularly inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that resulted in the household servant being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a boy and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured severe despair and followed his father into addiction. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured periods of overwhelming despair and what he called “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have questioned whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome. Before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could control a space. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, withdrawing into quiet when in social settings, disappearing for individual excursions.
Existential Anxieties and Turmoil of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing appalling inquiries. If the timeline of living beings had commenced ages before the arrival of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for humanity, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and lenses exposed areas immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, considering such evidence, in a deity who had created humanity in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the mankind meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Friendship
The author weaves his narrative together with a pair of persistent themes. The initial he presents early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the brief poem presents concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, indescribable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of verse and as the creator of symbols in which awful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive phrases.
The additional theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his interpretation 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 informed that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the old man with a beard in which “two owls and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.
