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Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of himself contemplated the pros and cons of self-destruction. Through this insightful work, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known character of the writer.

A Critical Year: That Fateful Year

During 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for almost twenty years. Consequently, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He got married, following a extended engagement. Before that, he had been residing in rented homes with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he moved into a residence where he could host notable callers. He became the official poet. His existence as a renowned figure began.

From his teens he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was very tall, messy but handsome

Ancestral Turmoil

The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was volatile and frequently drunk. There was an incident, the details of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another endured severe depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.

The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson

From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a space. But, maturing in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an small space – as an mature individual he desired isolation, retreating into quiet when in groups, vanishing for solitary journeys.

Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Conviction

In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing appalling queries. If the story of existence had started ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been made for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely formed for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and lenses uncovered spaces immensely huge and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, considering such evidence, in a deity who had made humanity in his own image? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then would the mankind follow suit?

Recurrent Elements: Kraken and Bond

The author weaves his narrative together with two recurring themes. The initial he establishes early on – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, unspeakable and tragic, concealed inaccessible of investigation, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of metre and as the creator of symbols in which awful unknown is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.

The other theme is the contrast. Where the mythical creature symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s great celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “two owls and a hen, several songbirds and a wren” made their dwellings.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|