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Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a piece named The Two Voices, wherein dual aspects of his personality debated the pros and cons of self-destruction. Within this revealing volume, the biographer chooses to focus on the lesser known identity of the poet.

A Defining Year: 1850

The year 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for almost a long period. Therefore, he grew both renowned and rich. He wed, subsequent to a long engagement. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he moved into a residence where he could entertain notable guests. He became the national poet. His existence as a Great Man began.

Even as a youth he was striking, almost glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive

Ancestral Turmoil

The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning prone to emotional swings and melancholy. His father, a hesitant priest, was volatile and very often drunk. Transpired an event, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from profound despair and followed his father into drinking. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself experienced periods of paralysing despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he could become one personally.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could command a space. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an attic room – as an adult he desired solitude, retreating into silence when in company, retreating for individual journeys.

Deep Anxieties and Crisis of Belief

In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing appalling questions. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun ages before the arrival of the humanity, then how to believe that the planet had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only formed for us, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and lenses exposed realms infinitely large and organisms minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s belief, considering such proof, in a deity who had made humanity in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then might the humanity meet the same fate?

Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond

The author binds his story together with a pair of recurring motifs. The initial he introduces early on – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the brief verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and sad, concealed inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the creator of metaphors in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.

The other theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a appreciation message in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, hand and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant foolishness of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” constructed their homes.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|