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Tennyson himself was known as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a piece titled The Two Voices, in which dual facets of himself contemplated the merits of suicide. Within this insightful book, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the poet.

A Critical Year: That Fateful Year

During 1850 became decisive for the poet. He unveiled the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for almost a long period. Consequently, he grew both celebrated and rich. He got married, following a long courtship. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his relatives, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or staying by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Then he took a home where he could receive prominent guests. He became the national poet. His career as a celebrated individual began.

Even as a youth he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome

Lineage Turmoil

The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating prone to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a hesitant minister, was irate and regularly drunk. Transpired an incident, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a mental institution as a youth and remained there for life. Another endured deep melancholy and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of overwhelming despair and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a gathering. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an small space – as an mature individual he craved isolation, retreating into silence when in groups, disappearing for individual excursions.

Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Conviction

In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing appalling questions. If the story of living beings had begun ages before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only created for humanity, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and microscopes revealed realms immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a God who had formed humanity in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the humanity do so too?

Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond

The author binds his narrative together with dual recurring themes. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the originator of images in which awful mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative lines.

The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on arm, hand and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure nicely suited to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a hen, four larks and a small bird” constructed their nests.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|