The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a divided individual. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, wherein dual aspects of his personality debated the merits of ending his life. In this illuminating book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known character of the writer.
A Defining Year: 1850
During 1850 became crucial for the poet. He published the great verse series In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to two decades. Consequently, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He got married, following a 14‑year relationship. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or living alone in a rundown dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he acquired a house where he could entertain prominent visitors. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome
Lineage Struggles
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to temperament and melancholy. His father, a reluctant priest, was volatile and regularly inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that resulted in the household servant being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for life. Another suffered from profound depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a space. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in groups, vanishing for solitary walking tours.
Deep Fears and Crisis of Faith
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the evolution, were raising appalling inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had commenced ages before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply made for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools uncovered realms immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had formed man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the mankind do so too?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Companionship
The biographer weaves his narrative together with dual persistent themes. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief sonnet establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, indescribable and sad, hidden inaccessible of human understanding, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of metre and as the author of metaphors in which terrible unknown is condensed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.
The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a grateful note in poetry portraying him in his flower bed with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” built their homes.
