The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Restless Years

The poet Tennyson existed as a torn soul. He produced a piece titled The Two Voices, where two versions of his personality argued the arguments of self-destruction. Within this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the more obscure character of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

During 1850 became crucial for Alfred. He published the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had worked for close to a long period. Consequently, he emerged as both renowned and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year relationship. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Now he took a residence where he could receive notable visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His life as a celebrated individual started.

From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking

Lineage Turmoil

His family, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His paternal figure, a hesitant clergyman, was irate and frequently intoxicated. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are vague, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a youth and lived there for the rest of his days. Another experienced severe melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming gloom and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must often have questioned whether he might turn into one personally.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

From his teens he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a space. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he sought out privacy, withdrawing into quiet when in groups, disappearing for solitary journeys.

Existential Anxieties and Turmoil of Faith

During his era, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening inquiries. If the timeline of living beings had begun eons before the appearance of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was only formed for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and magnifying tools revealed areas vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a God who had created man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the humanity do so too?

Repeating Themes: Kraken and Bond

The biographer binds his narrative together with a pair of persistent elements. The initial he presents initially – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and sad, hidden inaccessible of investigation, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the creator of images in which awful mystery is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive lines.

The other theme is the contrast. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his flower bed with his pet birds sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of pleasure excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a tiny creature” built their dwellings.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|