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Tennyson himself existed as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a verse titled The Two Voices, where dual versions of himself argued the pros and cons of ending his life. In this insightful work, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the writer.

A Defining Year: 1850

During 1850 became pivotal for Alfred. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for nearly two decades. Therefore, he became both renowned and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a extended courtship. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Now he took a residence where he could host distinguished guests. He became the national poet. His existence as a Great Man started.

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive

Family Struggles

His family, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating inclined to emotional swings and depression. His father, a reluctant priest, was volatile and regularly drunk. Occurred an event, the facts of which are obscure, that resulted in the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another suffered from severe melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating gloom and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.

The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson

Even as a youth he was striking, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but attractive. Before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, maturing in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an grown man he desired isolation, withdrawing into silence when in groups, retreating for individual excursions.

Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Faith

During his era, rock experts, celestial observers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were posing appalling questions. If the story of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely formed for humanity, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The modern viewing devices and microscopes uncovered spaces immensely huge and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s religion, given such evidence, in a deity who had made mankind in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then would the human race do so too?

Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Bond

The author binds his story together with two persistent themes. The initial he introduces at the beginning – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet introduces concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, indescribable and sad, hidden beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the originator of symbols in which terrible mystery is packed into a few strikingly indicative words.

The second element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic lines with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of pleasure excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s significant praise of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|