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The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted soul. He even composed a poem called The Two Voices, in which two versions of the poet argued the merits of suicide. Within this revealing volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the writer.

A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century

During 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for close to a long period. As a result, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He wed, following a 14‑year courtship. Earlier, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he moved into a residence where he could receive prominent guests. He became the national poet. His life as a Great Man commenced.

Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive

Family Struggles

His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a hesitant minister, was angry and regularly drunk. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for life. Another experienced severe depression and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself endured periods of paralysing despair and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.

The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even glamorous. He was of great height, messy but attractive. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a room. But, maturing crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he craved privacy, retreating into silence when in company, vanishing for individual excursions.

Deep Fears and Crisis of Belief

During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising appalling questions. If the history of life on Earth had begun ages before the appearance of the mankind, then how to maintain that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely created for us, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The recent telescopes and microscopes revealed realms vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such evidence, in a God who had formed man in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the human race meet the same fate?

Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Bond

Holmes weaves his story together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, unspeakable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the creator of symbols in which awful enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly suggestive phrases.

The other element is the contrast. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in verse portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb foolishness of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a small bird” built their homes.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|