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The poet Tennyson existed as a divided individual. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, where dual facets of the poet argued the merits of self-destruction. In this illuminating book, the biographer elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the literary figure.

A Defining Year: 1850

During 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He published the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost two decades. Consequently, he grew both renowned and prosperous. He entered matrimony, following a extended engagement. Previously, he had been living in rented homes with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he took a house where he could host distinguished visitors. He became the official poet. His life as a renowned figure began.

Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome

Lineage Struggles

His family, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant clergyman, was angry and very often drunk. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are vague, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a mental institution as a child and stayed there for his entire existence. Another experienced profound despair and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating gloom and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must regularly have wondered whether he could become one in his own right.

The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Even before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a room. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, retreating into stillness when in social settings, disappearing for lonely walking tours.

Deep Concerns and Upheaval of Conviction

In that period, geologists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising appalling questions. If the history of living beings had begun eons before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only created for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new viewing devices and microscopes exposed areas immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s religion, considering such proof, in a divine being who had formed humanity in his form? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then might the mankind meet the same fate?

Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Friendship

Holmes binds his account together with a pair of persistent themes. The first he presents initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something enormous, unutterable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the creator of images in which terrible mystery is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.

The additional element is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of delight excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|