Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years

Alfred Tennyson existed as a torn individual. He even composed a verse called The Two Voices, where contrasting aspects of his personality contemplated the arguments of suicide. Through this illuminating work, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the poet.

A Defining Year: That Fateful Year

During 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for nearly twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year relationship. Before that, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or living by himself in a rundown dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he moved into a home where he could host notable callers. He became the official poet. His life as a Great Man began.

From his teens he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking

Family Turmoil

The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to temperament and depression. His father, a reluctant minister, was volatile and very often intoxicated. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that caused 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 experienced profound depression and followed his father into drinking. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming despair and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is voiced by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he could become one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet

Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a room. But, having grown up in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an grown man he desired privacy, retreating into stillness when in social settings, retreating for lonely journeys.

Existential Fears and Upheaval of Belief

In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were posing appalling queries. If the history of existence had commenced ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools revealed realms vast beyond measure and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had formed man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the human race meet the same fate?

Repeating Motifs: Sea Monster and Companionship

Holmes ties his account together with dual recurring motifs. The first he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something immense, indescribable and sad, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few dazzlingly evocative words.

The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a grateful note in verse portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, palm and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” built their nests.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|