The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself was known as a conflicted individual. He produced a piece called The Two Voices, in which dual versions of the poet contemplated the arguments of self-destruction. Within this revealing book, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the lesser known identity of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 proved to be crucial for Alfred. He published the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for almost twenty years. Therefore, he became both celebrated and rich. He wed, after a extended courtship. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his family members, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he took a house where he could receive notable visitors. He became poet laureate. His life as a Great Man commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive
Lineage Challenges
His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His parent, a reluctant minister, was irate and frequently inebriated. There was an incident, the particulars of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another experienced profound depression and followed his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing gloom and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he could become one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a space. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an small space – as an grown man he sought out isolation, escaping into silence when in groups, disappearing for individual journeys.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had begun eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been made for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The new viewing devices and microscopes uncovered areas immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s faith, in light of such evidence, in a God who had created man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then might the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Friendship
The author binds his story together with a pair of recurrent themes. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and sad, submerged out of reach of investigation, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the originator of images in which terrible mystery is condensed into a few strikingly evocative lines.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a thank-you letter in verse portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves resting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of pleasure nicely suited to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” made their dwellings.
