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Alfred Tennyson existed as a divided spirit. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, where contrasting facets of the poet debated the arguments of suicide. Through this revealing book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the overlooked character of the writer.

A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year

The year 1850 became decisive for the poet. He published the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for almost twenty years. Therefore, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He wed, subsequent to a long courtship. Previously, he had been residing in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a rundown dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Now he acquired a home where he could host prominent callers. He was appointed the official poet. His career as a celebrated individual began.

From his teens he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking

Lineage Challenges

The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and depression. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and regularly drunk. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a child and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep depression and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of overwhelming gloom and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a space. But, maturing in close quarters with his siblings – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he sought out solitude, retreating into quiet when in company, vanishing for solitary journeys.

Philosophical Anxieties and Crisis of Faith

In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the evolution, were raising frightening queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for us, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and magnifying tools revealed spaces immensely huge and creatures infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, given such proof, in a God who had created mankind in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the mankind follow suit?

Persistent Motifs: Kraken and Friendship

Holmes ties his narrative together with two recurring motifs. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful student when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something vast, unutterable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of metre and as the creator of symbols in which terrible mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative words.

The other theme is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on back, wrist and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of pleasure excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a hen, several songbirds and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|