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Alfred Tennyson was known as a torn soul. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, in which two versions of himself argued the merits of self-destruction. Within this revealing work, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked identity of the poet.

A Critical Year: The Mid-Century

During 1850 became decisive for the poet. He released the great collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both renowned and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year relationship. Previously, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living alone in a dilapidated house on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Now he took a house where he could entertain prominent guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His life as a Great Man commenced.

From his teens he was imposing, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome

Family Challenges

His family, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating prone to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a reluctant minister, was angry and regularly inebriated. Occurred an incident, the details of which are vague, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a mental institution as a child and remained there for life. Another experienced deep depression and copied his father into drinking. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself endured periods of debilitating sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Even as a youth he was imposing, even magnetic. He was very tall, messy but handsome. Prior to he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could command a space. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he sought out privacy, withdrawing into silence when in company, retreating for solitary walking tours.

Deep Fears and Crisis of Belief

In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, astronomers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the timeline of life on Earth had commenced ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply formed for us, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and lenses exposed realms infinitely large and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s belief, given such findings, in a God who had made man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the mankind do so too?

Recurrent Motifs: Sea Monster and Companionship

The author binds his story together with dual persistent elements. The first he introduces early on – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, unutterable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the originator of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few brilliantly indicative words.

The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a grateful note in verse portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves sitting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, several songbirds and a wren” constructed their nests.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|