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Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted spirit. He famously wrote a poem named The Two Voices, in which two facets of himself argued the merits of self-destruction. In this illuminating book, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the lesser known identity of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year

The year 1850 became decisive for Alfred. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to a long period. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He wed, following a long engagement. Previously, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he moved into a residence where he could entertain prominent guests. He became poet laureate. His life as a renowned figure commenced.

From his teens he was striking, almost glamorous. He was very tall, messy but attractive

Ancestral Struggles

The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His parent, a reluctant priest, was angry and very often inebriated. Transpired an event, the facts of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for his entire existence. Another suffered from profound despair and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of debilitating sadness and what he called “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must often have questioned whether he was one personally.

The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson

From his teens he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but attractive. Before he began to wear a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a room. But, being raised crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he desired isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in social settings, disappearing for individual excursions.

Philosophical Fears and Turmoil of Conviction

During his era, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Darwin about the evolution, were posing appalling inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had begun ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was only formed for us, who reside on a minor world of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed realms immensely huge and beings infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, given such evidence, in a deity who had made mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the humanity meet the same fate?

Repeating Motifs: Kraken and Bond

The biographer binds his narrative together with two recurring motifs. The first he establishes early on – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short sonnet establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and sad, hidden beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a master of metre and as the originator of symbols in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few strikingly suggestive phrases.

The additional motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is affectionate and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, 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 tiny creature” built their nests.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|