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Tennyson himself existed as a conflicted individual. He produced a verse named The Two Voices, where contrasting facets of himself argued the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this insightful work, the author elects to spotlight on the more obscure character of the writer.

A Critical Year: That Fateful Year

During 1850 became pivotal for Alfred. He published the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost twenty years. Therefore, he became both famous and prosperous. He got married, after a long engagement. Previously, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he moved into a home where he could entertain prominent visitors. He became the official poet. His existence as a Great Man began.

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

Family Struggles

The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to moods and melancholy. His father, a unwilling priest, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a boy and stayed there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe depression and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of debilitating gloom and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.

The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson

From his teens he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking. Even before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a room. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired privacy, withdrawing into quiet when in groups, retreating for individual walking tours.

Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief

During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing appalling inquiries. If the history of living beings had commenced eons before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for humanity, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The recent telescopes and lenses revealed spaces vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s belief, in light of such evidence, in a God who had formed man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the humanity do so too?

Repeating Themes: Kraken and Bond

The biographer weaves his narrative together with two recurring motifs. The initial he establishes initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something vast, indescribable and sad, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of verse and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is condensed into a few strikingly suggestive words.

The second theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on back, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” constructed their nests.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|