The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided individual. He famously wrote a piece named The Two Voices, in which contrasting facets of the poet argued the merits of ending his life. Through this insightful volume, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He unveiled the significant verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly a long period. Therefore, he became both famous and wealthy. He wed, after a long relationship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or residing by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he moved into a home where he could entertain distinguished guests. He became the national poet. His career as a celebrated individual started.
Even as a youth he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Lineage Struggles
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His father, a hesitant minister, was irate and regularly drunk. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are unclear, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself endured episodes of paralysing despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must often have pondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a space. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his family members – three brothers to an attic room – as an adult he desired solitude, retreating into stillness when in company, disappearing for individual excursions.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Faith
During his era, earth scientists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing frightening questions. If the history of life on Earth had started millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the planet had been made for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply made for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The recent telescopes and lenses revealed realms infinitely large and organisms minutely tiny: how to keep one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a deity who had created man in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the mankind do so too?
Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Companionship
The author weaves his account together with a pair of persistent elements. The initial he presents initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem presents concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human understanding, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of symbols in which dreadful enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.
The other element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.