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Tennyson himself existed as a conflicted individual. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, wherein two facets of himself contemplated the arguments of suicide. Through this revealing volume, the biographer chooses to focus on the overlooked identity of the writer.

A Defining Year: That Fateful Year

In the year 1850 was pivotal for the poet. He published the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost two decades. Therefore, he became both renowned and prosperous. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended courtship. Previously, he had been residing in rented homes with his family members, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing alone in a dilapidated house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Then he acquired a house where he could receive prominent callers. He became the official poet. His life as a renowned figure commenced.

Even as a youth he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome

Lineage Turmoil

His family, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the family cook being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a child and lived there for life. Another endured severe melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing despair and what he called “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is voiced by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was striking, even charismatic. He was of great height, messy but attractive. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out privacy, withdrawing into quiet when in company, retreating for lonely excursions.

Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Conviction

In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were raising disturbing questions. If the story of existence had commenced eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to maintain that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only created for mankind, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The new telescopes and lenses uncovered spaces vast beyond measure and creatures minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such proof, in a deity who had formed humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then would the human race meet the same fate?

Persistent Elements: Kraken and Friendship

Holmes ties his story together with two recurrent motifs. The first he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line sonnet presents concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unutterable and sad, concealed inaccessible of investigation, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which awful enigma is compressed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.

The additional element is the counterpart. Where the imaginary creature symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on back, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant praise of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent foolishness of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their nests.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|