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Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted soul. He even composed a poem titled The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of himself argued the arguments of self-destruction. Through this insightful book, the author chooses to focus on the more obscure persona of the poet.

A Defining Year: That Fateful Year

The year 1850 became decisive for Alfred. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for close to two decades. Consequently, he became both renowned and prosperous. He wed, after a extended engagement. Earlier, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or staying alone in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he moved into a residence where he could host distinguished guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.

Even as a youth he was imposing, even charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking

Family Turmoil

His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to temperament and depression. His paternal figure, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and regularly drunk. Transpired an incident, the details of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and lived there for the rest of his days. Another endured deep despair and emulated his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have questioned whether he might turn into one himself.

The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson

From his teens he was striking, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could command a gathering. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he craved privacy, escaping into silence when in groups, vanishing for individual walking tours.

Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Belief

In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Darwin about the evolution, were raising appalling inquiries. If the story of living beings had commenced millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only formed for mankind, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern viewing devices and microscopes uncovered areas vast beyond measure and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, considering such findings, in a divine being who had created mankind in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then could the mankind meet the same fate?

Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Bond

The biographer binds his account together with a pair of recurring themes. The primary he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line poem presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, concealed out of reach of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of rhythm and as the creator of metaphors in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few strikingly indicative lines.

The second theme is the counterpart. Where the fictional beast represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, wrist and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of delight perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” made their nests.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|