The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted spirit. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, in which two versions of the poet debated the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this illuminating book, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 proved to be crucial for the poet. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for close to twenty years. Therefore, he became both famous and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a extended engagement. Before that, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing by himself in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he acquired a house where he could receive notable callers. He became the official poet. His life as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was of great height, messy but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating susceptible to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and very often drunk. There was an incident, the details of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a mental institution as a child and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured deep despair and copied his father into addiction. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Even before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a room. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he craved solitude, withdrawing into quiet when in company, retreating for solitary journeys.
Existential Concerns and Upheaval of Faith
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were posing frightening queries. If the history of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The recent viewing devices and lenses uncovered spaces immensely huge and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, in light of such evidence, in a divine being who had formed man in his form? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then might the humanity follow suit?
Repeating Elements: Mythical Beast and Bond
The biographer ties his narrative together with dual persistent elements. The primary he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something vast, unutterable and tragic, concealed out of reach of investigation, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the creator of symbols in which awful unknown is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive phrases.
The other theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary beast symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive lines with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent foolishness of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a wren” built their dwellings.
