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The poet Tennyson existed as a divided individual. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, in which two facets of the poet contemplated the arguments of self-destruction. Within this insightful book, the biographer chooses to focus on the lesser known identity of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

In the year 1850 proved to be crucial for Tennyson. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for almost twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both renowned and prosperous. He got married, following a 14‑year relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or staying alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak shores. At that point he moved into a home where he could host distinguished guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a celebrated individual commenced.

Even as a youth he was striking, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome

Lineage Struggles

The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was angry and regularly inebriated. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that caused the household servant being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for life. Another endured profound melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating gloom and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he was one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet

From his teens he was striking, even magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he started wearing a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a room. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he sought out solitude, escaping into quiet when in company, vanishing for individual walking tours.

Deep Concerns and Crisis of Conviction

In that period, geologists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the origin of species, were introducing disturbing inquiries. If the story of living beings had begun eons before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been made for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely made for us, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new telescopes and microscopes exposed spaces immensely huge and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s faith, considering such evidence, in a God who had formed mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then might the human race follow suit?

Repeating Themes: Kraken and Bond

The biographer weaves his account together with a pair of recurrent elements. The primary he presents early on – it is the symbol 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 mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse presents themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something immense, indescribable and sad, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the author of images in which awful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly suggestive words.

The second theme is the contrast. Where the mythical creature represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is affectionate and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|