Uncharted Depths: Delving into Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years

Tennyson himself was known as a conflicted spirit. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, where contrasting facets of himself argued the arguments of self-destruction. In this revealing work, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century

During 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He published the monumental verse series In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to a long period. As a result, he became both famous and rich. He got married, subsequent to a extended relationship. Before that, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he moved into a home where he could entertain distinguished callers. He became poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual began.

Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost magnetic. He was very tall, messy but handsome

Lineage Challenges

The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His parent, a unwilling priest, was irate and frequently inebriated. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are vague, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another endured deep melancholy and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming despair and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must often have pondered whether he was one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson

From his teens he was imposing, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a space. But, maturing in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an small space – as an mature individual he desired privacy, escaping into stillness when in social settings, disappearing for individual excursions.

Existential Concerns and Upheaval of Belief

In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, star gazers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Darwin about the origin of species, were raising frightening inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had started eons before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the earth had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely made for us, who reside on a minor world of a third-rate sun The recent viewing devices and microscopes uncovered spaces immensely huge and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, considering such proof, in a deity who had made man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the humanity follow suit?

Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Bond

The biographer ties his narrative together with two recurring themes. The primary he presents initially – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something vast, unutterable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of metre and as the originator of images in which awful mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.

The second motif is the counterpart. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a appreciation message in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|