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The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted individual. He even composed a verse named The Two Voices, where contrasting aspects of the poet debated the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this insightful work, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the poet.

A Critical Year: 1850

In the year 1850 was pivotal for Alfred. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for close to a long period. As a result, he emerged as both famous and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living in solitude in a ramshackle house on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he took a house where he could receive notable visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His career as a celebrated individual commenced.

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking

Ancestral Turmoil

The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to emotional swings and melancholy. His father, a unwilling priest, was irate and very often drunk. Transpired an incident, the particulars of which are obscure, that led to the domestic worker being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe melancholy and copied his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must often have wondered whether he was one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was striking, even glamorous. He was of great height, messy but attractive. Before he started wearing a dark cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a room. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an adult he craved isolation, retreating into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for individual excursions.

Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Faith

In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening questions. If the timeline of life on Earth had commenced ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The new optical instruments and microscopes uncovered realms immensely huge and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s faith, in light of such evidence, in a divine being who had created mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the human race do so too?

Persistent Elements: Kraken and Bond

The author ties his story together with dual recurring motifs. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line poem establishes ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something enormous, unspeakable and mournful, hidden inaccessible of human understanding, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of images in which terrible mystery is condensed into a few dazzlingly evocative words.

The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is affectionate and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on back, wrist and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of delight nicely suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the old man with a whiskers in which “two owls and a hen, four larks and a tiny creature” built their nests.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|