The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years

The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted spirit. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of the poet argued the pros and cons of suicide. Within this illuminating book, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked character of the literary figure.

A Defining Year: The Mid-Century

The year 1850 was pivotal for the poet. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and prosperous. He wed, following a long engagement. Before that, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he took a house where he could receive prominent callers. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a Great Man began.

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking

Ancestral Struggles

His family, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to moods and sadness. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was irate and very often intoxicated. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for life. Another suffered from profound depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have questioned whether he could become one personally.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he started wearing a dark cloak and headwear, he could dominate a room. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired privacy, escaping into silence when in company, vanishing for individual excursions.

Deep Fears and Upheaval of Belief

During his era, earth scientists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing appalling questions. If the timeline of living beings had commenced eons before the arrival of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only created for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools revealed spaces vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, given such findings, in a deity who had made mankind in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the mankind follow suit?

Persistent Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship

The biographer ties his narrative together with dual persistent themes. The first he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful student when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short sonnet presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and sad, submerged out of reach of human understanding, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a master of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.

The second element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic lines with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” built their nests.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|