The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years

Alfred Tennyson existed as a divided individual. He even composed a verse titled The Two Voices, where contrasting versions of the poet debated the arguments of self-destruction. Through this revealing volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the writer.

A Critical Year: 1850

During 1850 proved to be crucial for the poet. He published the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost a long period. Therefore, he emerged as both famous and prosperous. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year engagement. Before that, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or residing by himself in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Then he took a home where he could entertain prominent guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual began.

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome

Ancestral Challenges

The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning prone to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was angry and frequently drunk. There was an occurrence, the particulars of which are unclear, that led to the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a mental institution as a youth and remained there for life. Another endured severe melancholy and followed his father into addiction. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured periods of overwhelming despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he might turn into one personally.

The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet

From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, having grown up in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an adult he desired privacy, withdrawing into silence when in social settings, vanishing for lonely excursions.

Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Faith

During his era, geologists, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening queries. If the timeline of existence had started eons before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been formed for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely created for humanity, who reside on a minor world of a third-rate sun The recent telescopes and magnifying tools uncovered realms vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, considering such proof, in a divine being who had formed man in his form? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then could the human race meet the same fate?

Repeating Motifs: Sea Monster and Friendship

Holmes weaves his account together with a pair of persistent themes. The initial he presents early on – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something enormous, unspeakable and tragic, submerged inaccessible of human inquiry, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the creator of images in which awful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly suggestive lines.

The other motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, composed a grateful note in verse depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on arm, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of delight perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a wren” built their homes.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|