The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years

Alfred Tennyson existed as a conflicted soul. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, where dual facets of the poet debated the merits of suicide. In this insightful work, the biographer elects to spotlight on the overlooked identity of the writer.

A Defining Year: The Mid-Century

The year 1850 was pivotal for the poet. He published the great collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to a long period. Therefore, he grew both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, after a long courtship. Previously, he had been residing in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he moved into a home where he could host notable visitors. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual started.

Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome

Lineage Struggles

The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting inclined to moods and depression. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was volatile and frequently inebriated. There was an event, the facts of which are obscure, that resulted in the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another suffered from deep melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming despair and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His Maud is voiced by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he was one himself.

The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson

Even as a youth he was commanding, even charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he started wearing a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he sought out solitude, escaping into stillness when in social settings, retreating for lonely excursions.

Existential Fears and Crisis of Conviction

In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing frightening questions. If the story of living beings had begun eons before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for humanity, who reside on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The modern telescopes and microscopes uncovered spaces infinitely large and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s faith, considering such evidence, in a divine being who had formed man in his form? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the mankind meet the same fate?

Repeating Motifs: Sea Monster and Friendship

The author weaves his narrative together with a pair of persistent elements. The initial he establishes initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the brief verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something enormous, unutterable and tragic, concealed out of reach of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of metaphors in which terrible enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly suggestive words.

The other element is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a thank-you letter in verse describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on arm, wrist and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure nicely suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent absurdity of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “two owls and a hen, four larks and a tiny creature” made their homes.

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