The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years

The poet Tennyson emerged as a divided soul. He produced a piece called The Two Voices, in which contrasting aspects of the poet argued the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this illuminating book, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure character of the poet.

A Critical Year: The Mid-Century

In the year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He released the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both famous and rich. He got married, after a long relationship. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or staying by himself in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Then he moved into a house where he could host prominent visitors. He became the official poet. His life as a renowned figure commenced.

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive

Ancestral Struggles

The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to temperament and sadness. His father, a reluctant minister, was irate and regularly drunk. Transpired an event, the details of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another endured deep depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one personally.

The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet

Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a room. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an attic room – as an grown man he sought out solitude, retreating into silence when in social settings, disappearing for solitary journeys.

Deep Concerns and Turmoil of Conviction

In that period, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing appalling questions. If the story of existence had begun millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to maintain that the earth had been made for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply made for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and microscopes uncovered areas vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, considering such proof, in a divine being who had made mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then might the mankind follow suit?

Repeating Themes: Kraken and Companionship

The biographer binds his story together with two recurrent themes. The primary he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet presents concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the author of images in which awful mystery is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive lines.

The second element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry describing him in his garden with his tame doves resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, wrist and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of pleasure excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful 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, several songbirds and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|