Uncharted Depths: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted soul. He even composed a verse named The Two Voices, in which two versions of the poet argued the merits of self-destruction. In this insightful volume, the author decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 proved to be decisive for Alfred. He published the significant verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for close to two decades. Therefore, he grew both famous and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a extended relationship. Previously, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he took a house where he could receive notable guests. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a Great Man started.
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting inclined to temperament and sadness. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and very often drunk. There was an incident, the particulars of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for life. Another experienced profound despair and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself experienced bouts of paralysing gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, being raised crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he craved privacy, retreating into silence when in company, disappearing for individual walking tours.
Philosophical Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief
In that period, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing appalling queries. If the timeline of existence had commenced ages before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply made for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The new viewing devices and lenses exposed areas vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had created humanity in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then could the human race follow suit?
Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Bond
The biographer binds his story together with two recurrent elements. The primary he presents at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, hidden out of reach of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of verse and as the originator of symbols in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The additional theme is the counterpart. Where the mythical creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is loving and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a grateful note in verse describing him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a small bird” constructed their nests.
