Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years

The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, where dual facets of his personality contemplated the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this revealing book, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure persona of the literary figure.

A Critical Year: The Mid-Century

The year 1850 became crucial for the poet. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for almost twenty years. Consequently, he grew both celebrated and prosperous. He entered matrimony, following a 14‑year courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing alone in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he moved into a residence where he could entertain distinguished guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His life as a Great Man began.

From his teens he was striking, almost magnetic. He was very tall, messy but attractive

Ancestral Challenges

The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning prone to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling priest, was angry and frequently intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are vague, that resulted in the family cook being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a mental institution as a child and lived there for life. Another endured severe depression and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of overwhelming gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must often have wondered whether he could become one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson

Even as a youth he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking. Prior to he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he craved privacy, withdrawing into silence when in social settings, retreating for solitary excursions.

Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Belief

In that period, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing disturbing queries. If the timeline of living beings had begun eons before the appearance of the human race, then how to maintain that the planet had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for us, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The recent telescopes and lenses uncovered areas immensely huge and organisms minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such evidence, in a deity who had formed man in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then would the mankind do so too?

Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship

The author binds his account together with dual recurrent motifs. The initial he introduces at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and tragic, hidden out of reach of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of images in which terrible unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.

The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” built their homes.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|