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Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a piece named The Two Voices, where dual aspects of the poet contemplated the arguments of suicide. Through this revealing work, the author decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the writer.

A Defining Year: 1850

During 1850 proved to be pivotal for the poet. He released the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and prosperous. He got married, subsequent to a long courtship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Now he moved into a house where he could entertain distinguished visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a Great Man began.

From his teens he was imposing, even magnetic. He was of great height, messy but attractive

Lineage Struggles

The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to moods and sadness. His parent, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and regularly drunk. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for life. Another experienced deep despair and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming sadness and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he was one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could control a space. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he desired isolation, withdrawing into silence when in groups, disappearing for individual excursions.

Existential Concerns and Turmoil of Belief

During his era, rock experts, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising appalling questions. If the history of living beings had commenced ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for mankind, who reside on a minor world of a common sun.” The recent telescopes and lenses revealed realms infinitely large and creatures minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s belief, considering such evidence, in a divine being who had created mankind in his form? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then would the mankind meet the same fate?

Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship

The biographer weaves his account together with two recurring themes. The first he introduces early on – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something vast, unspeakable and sad, concealed out of reach of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the author of symbols in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few strikingly indicative lines.

The second element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb nonsense of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a small bird” made their homes.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|