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Tennyson himself was known as a torn spirit. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, in which dual versions of the poet argued the arguments of ending his life. In this illuminating volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure persona of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

In the year 1850 was crucial for Alfred. He unveiled the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He entered matrimony, following a long engagement. Previously, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. At that point he moved into a house where he could host prominent callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a renowned figure started.

From his teens he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome

Family Turmoil

His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant priest, was volatile and very often inebriated. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a mental institution as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured deep depression and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he could become one personally.

The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson

Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Even before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a space. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an small space – as an grown man he sought out solitude, escaping into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for lonely excursions.

Philosophical Anxieties and Crisis of Belief

In that period, rock experts, star gazers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had commenced ages before the arrival of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply formed for humanity, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The modern viewing devices and microscopes exposed spaces immensely huge and beings infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a divine being who had made man in his form? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then could the human race do so too?

Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Companionship

Holmes ties his narrative together with a pair of recurring themes. The primary he introduces initially – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of metre and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.

The additional motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals 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 visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a appreciation message in verse depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on arm, wrist and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight nicely suited to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of hedonism – 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 pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|