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The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted individual. He produced a piece titled The Two Voices, wherein two facets of his personality debated the pros and cons of suicide. In this revealing volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the literary figure.

A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century

The year 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to two decades. Consequently, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year engagement. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he acquired a house where he could receive notable guests. He became the official poet. His existence as a celebrated individual began.

Even as a youth he was imposing, even charismatic. He was very tall, messy but handsome

Ancestral Challenges

The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and sadness. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. Occurred an incident, the particulars of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and stayed there for life. Another experienced profound despair and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating gloom and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson

From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a room. But, having grown up crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in company, retreating for lonely journeys.

Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Faith

During his era, geologists, star gazers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were posing appalling questions. If the story of existence had started millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to maintain that the world had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only formed for us, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new telescopes and lenses revealed realms vast beyond measure and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such evidence, in a divine being who had created man in his form? If dinosaurs had become died out, then could the humanity meet the same fate?

Persistent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Friendship

Holmes binds his story together with two persistent elements. The primary he presents early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unutterable and tragic, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of metre and as the originator of symbols in which terrible mystery is packed into a few strikingly evocative lines.

The additional theme is the contrast. Where the fictional beast symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a appreciation message in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” built their homes.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|