The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years

The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted spirit. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of the poet argued the merits of self-destruction. Within this illuminating work, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the more obscure identity of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

In the year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for close to twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a long courtship. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or residing alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Then he moved into a house where he could entertain notable guests. He became the official poet. His career as a renowned figure started.

Even as a youth he was striking, almost charismatic. He was very tall, messy but attractive

Ancestral Turmoil

The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to temperament and sadness. His parent, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and regularly drunk. Transpired an incident, the details of which are obscure, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for life. Another experienced profound depression and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of debilitating despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a insane person: he must regularly have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.

The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet

Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but attractive. Even before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – several relatives to an attic room – as an grown man he craved isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in social settings, retreating for individual excursions.

Existential Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief

During his era, geologists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing appalling queries. If the story of existence had started ages before the emergence of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply formed for humanity, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and magnifying tools uncovered spaces immensely huge and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, considering such findings, in a divine being who had formed mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then would the mankind follow suit?

Persistent Motifs: Kraken and Friendship

Holmes ties his narrative together with two recurring themes. The primary he introduces initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse establishes ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, unspeakable and sad, hidden out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the author of symbols in which terrible unknown is packed into a few strikingly indicative lines.

The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of joy excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb foolishness of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” made their dwellings.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|