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The poet Tennyson was known as a divided soul. He famously wrote a verse named The Two Voices, wherein dual facets of his personality argued the arguments of self-destruction. Through this illuminating volume, the author decides to concentrate on the lesser known character of the literary figure.

A Defining Year: 1850

During 1850 was pivotal for the poet. He released the monumental verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly two decades. As a result, he became both celebrated and rich. He got married, after a extended courtship. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his relatives, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or living by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he took a residence where he could entertain distinguished guests. He became the national poet. His life as a renowned figure commenced.

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

Lineage Struggles

The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His father, a unwilling priest, was irate and frequently drunk. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a child and lived there for life. Another suffered from severe depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could command a room. But, maturing crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he desired solitude, retreating into quiet when in social settings, retreating for solitary journeys.

Deep Fears and Crisis of Conviction

During his era, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the evolution, were posing appalling questions. If the story of living beings had begun ages before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been formed for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely made for us, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools uncovered spaces immensely huge and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s faith, in light of such evidence, in a God who had formed mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the mankind follow suit?

Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Friendship

Holmes ties his narrative together with dual recurring elements. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet introduces concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something enormous, unutterable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the author of images in which awful enigma is packed into a few strikingly indicative lines.

The additional element is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of pleasure nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant nonsense of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” built their nests.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|