Uncharted Depths: Exploring Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself was known as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, in which two aspects of his personality argued the arguments of ending his life. Within this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: 1850
The year 1850 proved to be crucial for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to two decades. Consequently, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a long courtship. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown house on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he acquired a residence where he could host notable visitors. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a renowned figure started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive
Family Challenges
His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning susceptible to moods and melancholy. His father, a unwilling minister, was angry and frequently drunk. Occurred an incident, the particulars of which are unclear, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep despair and followed his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, almost glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could command a room. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an adult he craved isolation, escaping into quiet when in groups, disappearing for individual journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Conviction
In that period, rock experts, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were raising appalling questions. If the history of living beings had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only made for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and lenses uncovered spaces immensely huge and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a deity who had created man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then would the humanity do so too?
Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Bond
The author ties his narrative together with dual recurrent elements. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young scholar when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, submerged inaccessible of human understanding, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a master of metre and as the creator of symbols in which awful enigma is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive phrases.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary beast epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on arm, wrist and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a hen, several songbirds and a small bird” built their homes.
