The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years

Alfred Tennyson was known as a torn individual. He famously wrote a verse named The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of the poet debated the merits of ending his life. Through this insightful work, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the writer.

A Defining Year: The Mid-Century

During 1850 proved to be crucial for Alfred. He released the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had worked for almost twenty years. As a result, he became both celebrated and prosperous. He got married, after a long courtship. Before that, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren coasts. At that point he moved into a home where he could entertain notable callers. He became poet laureate. His career as a celebrated individual commenced.

Even as a youth he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome

Family Challenges

The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning prone to moods and melancholy. His father, a unwilling minister, was irate and frequently inebriated. Occurred an incident, the facts of which are vague, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe despair and followed his father into drinking. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet

From his teens he was imposing, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a room. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he craved solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in company, retreating for lonely walking tours.

Deep Fears and Upheaval of Conviction

In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the evolution, were posing appalling questions. If the timeline of life on Earth had started millions of years before the emergence of the mankind, then how to maintain that the earth had been made for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply formed for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The recent viewing devices and microscopes exposed spaces infinitely large and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s religion, given such findings, in a deity who had created mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the human race do so too?

Repeating Motifs: Sea Monster and Friendship

Holmes weaves his story together with a pair of persistent elements. The primary he establishes early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something vast, indescribable and tragic, hidden out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a expert of verse and as the creator of images in which awful enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.

The second motif is the contrast. Where the imaginary creature symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a wren” made their dwellings.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|