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Tennyson himself was known as a torn individual. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, in which two aspects of himself debated the arguments of suicide. Through this illuminating book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the poet.

A Critical Year: 1850

During 1850 became decisive for the poet. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for nearly two decades. Therefore, he became both famous and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a extended engagement. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak shores. At that point he took a residence where he could entertain prominent callers. He assumed the role of the official poet. His existence as a celebrated individual started.

Starting in adolescence he was striking, even charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking

Ancestral Struggles

The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to temperament and depression. His paternal figure, a hesitant minister, was volatile and very often inebriated. Transpired an event, the details of which are unclear, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another suffered from deep melancholy and followed his father into addiction. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of debilitating despair and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is voiced by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one personally.

The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson

From his teens he was striking, even charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a space. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he craved solitude, escaping into quiet when in company, vanishing for solitary excursions.

Philosophical Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief

In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were raising frightening questions. If the history of life on Earth had commenced millions of years before the emergence of the mankind, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only formed for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and microscopes uncovered areas infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s religion, given such findings, in a divine being who had made man in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then could the mankind follow suit?

Repeating Motifs: Mythical Beast and Bond

Holmes ties his account together with a pair of persistent themes. The first he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the short verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something vast, unspeakable and mournful, hidden inaccessible of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the creator of images in which awful mystery is condensed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.

The additional element is the contrast. Where the mythical sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure excellently suited to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a wren” constructed their nests.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|