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Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, in which contrasting aspects of himself argued the merits of suicide. In this revealing book, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the more obscure persona of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year

In the year 1850 became crucial for Alfred. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended courtship. Before that, he had been residing in rented homes with his relatives, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or residing by himself in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he acquired a home where he could host distinguished visitors. He became the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.

From his teens he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, messy but attractive

Family Struggles

The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to emotional swings and melancholy. His father, a reluctant minister, was irate and regularly drunk. Transpired an occurrence, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the household servant being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a mental institution as a child and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe despair and followed his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself endured periods of paralysing despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Even as a youth he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome. Before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could command a room. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his siblings – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he craved privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in groups, vanishing for solitary journeys.

Philosophical Anxieties and Crisis of Conviction

In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing appalling queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had started eons before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely created for humanity, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and microscopes revealed areas infinitely large and beings minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a divine being who had created man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then could the humanity meet the same fate?

Persistent Motifs: Kraken and Friendship

The biographer weaves his narrative together with two recurrent motifs. The initial he introduces initially – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line verse introduces ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and sad, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of metre and as the originator of images in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few strikingly suggestive phrases.

The additional theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is affectionate and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a appreciation message in verse describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds perching all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of pleasure excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a wren” constructed their dwellings.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|