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Alfred Tennyson was known as a torn spirit. He produced a verse named The Two Voices, in which dual facets of himself argued the pros and cons of suicide. Within this insightful work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the poet.

A Critical Year: 1850

During 1850 became crucial for Alfred. He released the monumental verse series In Memoriam, on which he had worked for almost a long period. Consequently, he grew both famous and rich. He wed, subsequent to a extended engagement. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he acquired a residence where he could receive notable visitors. He became the official poet. His life as a Great Man started.

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive

Lineage Struggles

His family, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His father, a hesitant priest, was irate and frequently inebriated. Transpired an incident, the details of which are unclear, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another suffered from severe depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself endured periods of overwhelming sadness and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.

The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, messy but attractive. Even before he adopted a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he craved privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for solitary excursions.

Philosophical Fears and Turmoil of Conviction

In that period, geologists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had commenced millions of years before the emergence of the mankind, then how to hold that the world had been created for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only created for us, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new viewing devices and magnifying tools exposed spaces vast beyond measure and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s belief, considering such evidence, in a divine being who had formed mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the mankind meet the same fate?

Repeating Motifs: Mythical Beast and Bond

The biographer binds his narrative together with dual persistent motifs. The primary he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the brief verse presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something immense, indescribable and tragic, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of verse and as the author of symbols in which awful enigma is compressed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.

The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of delight nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a wren” made their dwellings.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|