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Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein dual aspects of himself debated the merits of self-destruction. Through this insightful book, the biographer decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the literary figure.

A Critical Year: That Fateful Year

In the year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for nearly a long period. Therefore, he grew both renowned and rich. He wed, after a 14‑year relationship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren beaches. At that point he moved into a house where he could host prominent guests. He was appointed poet laureate. His career as a renowned figure started.

From his teens he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive

Lineage Turmoil

His family, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting inclined to moods and melancholy. His father, a hesitant priest, was volatile and very often drunk. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a mental institution as a boy and lived there for life. Another suffered from severe depression and followed his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.

The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson

Even as a youth he was imposing, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Before he started wearing a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a room. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – three brothers to an attic room – as an adult he sought out isolation, escaping into quiet when in groups, vanishing for solitary walking tours.

Existential Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief

During his era, earth scientists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing appalling queries. If the history of living beings had commenced eons before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only created for us, who reside on a minor world of a common sun.” The recent viewing devices and microscopes uncovered realms vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such evidence, in a God who had made humanity in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the humanity meet the same fate?

Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Friendship

Holmes weaves his narrative together with a pair of persistent themes. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the short verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, submerged inaccessible of human understanding, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the originator of symbols in which terrible unknown is condensed into a few strikingly suggestive words.

The additional element is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a appreciation message in poetry describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, wrist and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a small bird” made their dwellings.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|