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Tennyson himself existed as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a poem named The Two Voices, in which dual versions of the poet debated the arguments of suicide. Through this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year

During 1850 became decisive for the poet. He unveiled the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly twenty years. Consequently, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a 14‑year relationship. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing alone in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. At that point he moved into a residence where he could host prominent callers. He was appointed the official poet. His existence as a renowned figure started.

Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome

Family Turmoil

His family, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a unwilling priest, was angry and regularly inebriated. Transpired an event, the details of which are unclear, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a child and stayed there for life. Another experienced severe depression and followed his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.

The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson

From his teens he was imposing, even magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing crowded with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an attic room – as an adult he desired isolation, withdrawing into silence when in groups, vanishing for lonely journeys.

Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief

In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing disturbing queries. If the story of existence had commenced eons before the appearance of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely created for humanity, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and lenses revealed areas infinitely large and organisms minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a God who had created humanity in his form? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the human race meet the same fate?

Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Bond

The author weaves his story together with two recurring elements. The primary he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem introduces concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something immense, indescribable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of verse and as the creator of images in which terrible unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly indicative lines.

The additional element is the counterpart. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their nests.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|