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The poet Tennyson emerged as a divided soul. He famously wrote a verse named The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of himself contemplated the pros and cons of suicide. In this illuminating work, the biographer chooses to focus on the lesser known identity of the poet.

A Defining Year: 1850

In the year 1850 was decisive for Alfred. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to a long period. As a result, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He got married, after a 14‑year engagement. Before that, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or residing by himself in a ramshackle house on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he took a house where he could host prominent visitors. He assumed the role of the official poet. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.

Even as a youth he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive

Lineage Struggles

The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and depression. His parent, a hesitant minister, was volatile and very often intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are vague, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a child and remained there for life. Another endured deep melancholy and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he could become one himself.

The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson

Even as a youth he was commanding, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking. Even before he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a room. But, maturing crowded with his family members – three brothers to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved isolation, escaping into silence when in social settings, vanishing for lonely excursions.

Deep Concerns and Crisis of Faith

In that period, rock experts, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Darwin about the evolution, were posing frightening inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the emergence of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply created for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern telescopes and microscopes uncovered realms vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had made mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then would the mankind meet the same fate?

Persistent Themes: Kraken and Bond

The author weaves his narrative together with dual recurring motifs. The primary he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the brief verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, unutterable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of symbols in which dreadful enigma is packed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.

The additional theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a hen, several songbirds and a wren” built their nests.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|