The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided soul. He even composed a poem called The Two Voices, in which two versions of his personality argued the pros and cons of suicide. In this illuminating volume, the biographer elects to spotlight on the overlooked identity of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 was crucial for the poet. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost two decades. As a result, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a 14‑year relationship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying by himself in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he took a home where he could receive notable guests. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a Great Man commenced.
From his teens he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Lineage Turmoil
His family, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting inclined to moods and melancholy. His paternal figure, a hesitant minister, was volatile and regularly intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the family cook being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a mental institution as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another experienced profound melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of debilitating gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Prior to he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a space. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he sought out solitude, escaping into stillness when in groups, retreating for lonely journeys.
Deep Fears and Crisis of Faith
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening questions. If the history of existence had started ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and lenses uncovered spaces infinitely large and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, considering such findings, in a God who had made mankind in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then would the human race do so too?
Repeating Elements: Kraken and Bond
The biographer ties his account together with dual recurring motifs. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something immense, unutterable and tragic, hidden inaccessible of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the creator of metaphors in which terrible enigma is compressed into a few strikingly suggestive words.
The other theme is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive lines with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, hand and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “two owls and a hen, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their homes.
