Uncharted Depths: Delving into Early Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a torn spirit. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, in which dual versions of himself debated the merits of self-destruction. Within this insightful book, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 proved to be crucial for Alfred. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living in solitude in a rundown cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he acquired a home where he could receive distinguished guests. He became the official poet. His existence as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to temperament and depression. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was irate and frequently drunk. Occurred an event, the facts of which are vague, that caused the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for his entire existence. Another suffered from deep despair and copied his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced periods of paralysing gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive. Before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he desired privacy, escaping into silence when in groups, vanishing for lonely journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising frightening questions. If the story of living beings had commenced millions of years before the emergence of the human race, then how to maintain that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only created for mankind, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The recent viewing devices and lenses uncovered areas infinitely large and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s faith, given such proof, in a deity who had created mankind in his form? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then could the humanity follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship
Holmes binds his account together with two persistent themes. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief verse establishes ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, unspeakable and tragic, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the originator of metaphors in which terrible mystery is condensed into a few strikingly evocative phrases.
The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of pleasure perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb foolishness of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.
