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Alfred Tennyson existed as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a verse called The Two Voices, where dual facets of his personality argued the merits of suicide. Through this revealing volume, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the literary figure.

A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year

During 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost two decades. As a result, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a long engagement. Earlier, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. At that point he took a residence where he could receive notable guests. He became the national poet. His existence as a renowned figure started.

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive

Family Turmoil

The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to moods and melancholy. His father, a hesitant priest, was angry and regularly inebriated. Occurred an event, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a boy and lived there for life. Another suffered from deep melancholy and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself suffered from periods of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have pondered whether he was one himself.

The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, messy but good-looking. Before he adopted a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a space. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he sought out isolation, escaping into stillness when in groups, vanishing for solitary journeys.

Existential Anxieties and Upheaval of Conviction

During his era, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were posing appalling queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had commenced eons before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely created for humanity, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The modern telescopes and microscopes exposed areas infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a God who had formed man in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the humanity follow suit?

Recurrent Elements: Sea Monster and Bond

The biographer ties his story together with dual persistent motifs. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short sonnet presents concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, unutterable and tragic, concealed inaccessible of investigation, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of metre and as the author of images in which terrible enigma is compressed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.

The other theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme describing him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of joy excellently suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a wren” made their nests.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|