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Tennyson himself emerged as a torn individual. He produced a piece called The Two Voices, where contrasting facets of his personality argued the arguments of suicide. Within this revealing book, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the poet.

A Defining Year: That Fateful Year

The year 1850 was pivotal for Alfred. He released the great poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for close to two decades. As a result, he grew both renowned and rich. He got married, following a long relationship. Previously, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying by himself in a ramshackle house on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he took a house where he could host notable callers. He became the official poet. His life as a celebrated individual started.

Even as a youth he was striking, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive

Family Turmoil

The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating prone to temperament and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling priest, was volatile and regularly inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a youth and remained there for life. Another suffered from profound despair and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is voiced by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he could become one himself.

The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson

Even as a youth he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a space. But, maturing in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an small space – as an mature individual he desired isolation, withdrawing into silence when in company, disappearing for individual walking tours.

Deep Fears and Crisis of Belief

In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the origin of species, were raising disturbing questions. If the story of living beings had started millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to believe that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely created for us, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools revealed areas vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s faith, considering such findings, in a deity who had made man in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then could the humanity meet the same fate?

Persistent Elements: Kraken and Bond

Holmes ties his story together with two persistent elements. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, indescribable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of metre and as the author of symbols in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few strikingly evocative lines.

The other element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in verse portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a beard in which “two owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a wren” built their nests.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|