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Tennyson himself existed as a conflicted spirit. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, where dual aspects of the poet debated the arguments of ending his life. Within this insightful book, the biographer elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the poet.

A Defining Year: The Mid-Century

During 1850 became crucial for Alfred. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had worked for nearly twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year relationship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing alone in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. At that point he moved into a house where he could entertain notable guests. He became the official poet. His life as a Great Man began.

From his teens he was imposing, even magnetic. He was very tall, messy but attractive

Lineage Turmoil

The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to moods and depression. His parent, a unwilling priest, was volatile and regularly drunk. Occurred an incident, the particulars of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a mental institution as a boy and lived there for life. Another experienced profound melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of debilitating sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

From his teens he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive. Before he adopted a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a space. But, having grown up crowded with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved solitude, escaping into quiet when in groups, disappearing for lonely walking tours.

Philosophical Anxieties and Crisis of Conviction

In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the origin of species, were introducing frightening queries. If the story of living beings had begun millions of years before the emergence of the mankind, then how to hold that the earth had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply created for humanity, who reside on a minor world of a ordinary star The new viewing devices and lenses exposed realms immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had made man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the human race follow suit?

Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Companionship

The biographer ties his account together with dual persistent elements. The primary he establishes early on – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the short poem establishes ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and mournful, submerged inaccessible of human understanding, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the originator of images in which terrible enigma is compressed into a few strikingly indicative lines.

The other theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his tame doves resting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, wrist and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb absurdity of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their nests.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|