The Vast Unknown: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years

Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, where contrasting versions of the poet debated the merits of ending his life. Through this insightful book, the author chooses to focus on the more obscure persona of the poet.

A Defining Year: That Fateful Year

The year 1850 was pivotal for Tennyson. He released the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost two decades. Consequently, he grew both famous and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or residing by himself in a ramshackle cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Now he acquired a residence where he could host notable guests. He became the national poet. His career as a Great Man commenced.

Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome

Ancestral Turmoil

The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant priest, was volatile and very often intoxicated. There was an event, the facts of which are vague, that resulted in the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a mental institution as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured deep depression and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he was one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a space. But, maturing in close quarters with his family members – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired privacy, retreating into silence when in groups, disappearing for lonely journeys.

Existential Anxieties and Turmoil of Faith

In that period, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing frightening inquiries. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for humanity, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools uncovered areas immensely huge and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s religion, considering such evidence, in a deity who had formed man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then could the humanity meet the same fate?

Persistent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Friendship

Holmes ties his story together with two recurring motifs. The initial he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, hidden out of reach of human inquiry, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the originator of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive lines.

The other element is the counterpart. Where the mythical creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is affectionate and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a grateful note in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of joy nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb foolishness of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a tiny creature” made their nests.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|