The Vast Unknown: Delving into Young Tennyson's Restless Years

Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted spirit. He produced a piece titled The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of the poet contemplated the merits of ending his life. In this revealing work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked character of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

The year 1850 proved to be crucial for Alfred. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for nearly twenty years. As a result, he became both renowned and prosperous. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year courtship. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his relatives, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living by himself in a rundown dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Then he acquired a home where he could host prominent visitors. He was appointed the national poet. His existence as a Great Man started.

Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, messy but attractive

Lineage Turmoil

The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to temperament and sadness. His father, a hesitant minister, was angry and regularly intoxicated. Occurred an event, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another experienced profound despair and followed his father into drinking. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself experienced bouts of paralysing despair and what he termed “strange episodes”. His Maud is told by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he was one himself.

The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet

Even as a youth he was commanding, even magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an attic room – as an grown man he sought out solitude, escaping into silence when in company, disappearing for solitary walking tours.

Deep Concerns and Turmoil of Faith

In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising appalling questions. If the story of living beings had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely made for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent viewing devices and microscopes exposed spaces infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a God who had made mankind in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the human race do so too?

Persistent Elements: Mythical Beast and Friendship

The biographer weaves his story together with dual recurrent motifs. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the brief verse introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something vast, unspeakable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of rhythm and as the creator of symbols in which terrible enigma is condensed into a few strikingly evocative lines.

The additional theme is the contrast. Where the mythical creature epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb foolishness of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a small bird” made their homes.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|