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Alfred Tennyson existed as a divided individual. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, in which two aspects of the poet contemplated the arguments of ending his life. In this illuminating volume, the author elects to spotlight on the overlooked character of the literary figure.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

In the year 1850 proved to be crucial for the poet. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had worked for close to two decades. As a result, he became both famous and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been residing in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying by himself in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Then he took a residence where he could host notable callers. He became poet laureate. His career as a celebrated individual commenced.

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking

Ancestral Challenges

His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and regularly inebriated. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a youth and remained there for life. Another endured severe melancholy and followed his father into addiction. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of overwhelming gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he could become one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, messy but attractive. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he sought out solitude, retreating into silence when in social settings, retreating for individual walking tours.

Existential Anxieties and Upheaval of Faith

In that period, rock experts, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were raising disturbing queries. If the story of living beings had begun eons before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and microscopes uncovered realms vast beyond measure and organisms minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such findings, in a divine being who had created mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then might the mankind meet the same fate?

Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship

Holmes binds his account together with dual persistent elements. The primary he establishes initially – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “ancient legends, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, unspeakable and tragic, hidden out of reach of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of rhythm and as the creator of images in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly evocative lines.

The additional element is the contrast. Where the fictional creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, wrist and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of joy excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s significant praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb nonsense of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a hen, several songbirds and a tiny creature” made their homes.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|