The Boundless Deep: Exploring Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He produced a verse named The Two Voices, where two facets of the poet debated the pros and cons of self-destruction. Through this insightful book, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became decisive for the poet. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to two decades. Consequently, he became both famous and rich. He got married, after a long relationship. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his family members, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or staying by himself in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Then he moved into a residence where he could host notable callers. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a Great Man began.
From his teens he was imposing, even magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning prone to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a reluctant clergyman, was angry and regularly drunk. Occurred an incident, the facts of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and lived there for life. Another endured deep despair and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself endured periods of overwhelming sadness and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he was one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, messy but good-looking. Before he adopted a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a space. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved solitude, escaping into quiet when in company, disappearing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing frightening queries. If the timeline of existence had commenced eons before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for mankind, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The recent viewing devices and lenses uncovered areas vast beyond measure and beings tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s belief, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had made man in his form? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then could the humanity do so too?
Persistent Elements: Kraken and Friendship
The biographer binds his narrative together with dual recurrent elements. The first he establishes early on – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the brief verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something enormous, unutterable and tragic, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which awful enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.
The other theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds perching all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of pleasure excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a small bird” built their dwellings.