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Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided individual. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of the poet argued the arguments of ending his life. In this insightful work, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the literary figure.

A Defining Year: That Fateful Year

In the year 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He published the great collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost a long period. Therefore, he became both famous and wealthy. He got married, following a long courtship. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or living by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he took a house where he could receive distinguished guests. He became poet laureate. His career as a Great Man commenced.

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking

Lineage Challenges

The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a unwilling minister, was volatile and regularly drunk. There was an event, the facts of which are vague, that resulted in the domestic worker being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a mental institution as a child and stayed there for his entire existence. Another suffered from severe melancholy and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he could become one in his own right.

The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson

From his teens he was imposing, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking. Before he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could command a room. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – three brothers to an attic room – as an adult he sought out privacy, retreating into stillness when in company, vanishing for lonely journeys.

Deep Fears and Upheaval of Conviction

In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, astronomers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising disturbing questions. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely formed for humanity, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The new telescopes and lenses exposed realms immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s religion, in light of such findings, in a deity who had made mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then could the human race do so too?

Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship

The biographer binds his story together with a pair of recurring elements. The first he establishes at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet establishes concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something immense, indescribable and tragic, concealed inaccessible of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the originator of images in which awful unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.

The additional motif is the contrast. Where the mythical creature symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, hand and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of pleasure excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a tiny creature” constructed their nests.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|