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The poet Tennyson was known as a divided individual. He famously wrote a poem titled The Two Voices, wherein two facets of his personality contemplated the merits of ending his life. Within this illuminating work, the author chooses to focus on the overlooked identity of the writer.

A Defining Year: 1850

The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost a long period. As a result, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He got married, after a long relationship. Before that, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren beaches. At that point he acquired a house where he could receive distinguished guests. He became the national poet. His existence as a Great Man started.

From his teens he was striking, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive

Lineage Struggles

The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning prone to moods and sadness. His parent, a hesitant minister, was irate and regularly drunk. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that caused the household servant being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a child and lived there for his entire existence. Another suffered from deep despair and copied his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured episodes of debilitating sadness and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a insane person: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one himself.

The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson

From his teens he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a space. But, being raised crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved solitude, escaping into stillness when in company, retreating for lonely excursions.

Deep Fears and Upheaval of Belief

During his era, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing frightening inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had started millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely formed for mankind, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The recent viewing devices and lenses uncovered realms vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, given such findings, in a divine being who had created humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then would the humanity follow suit?

Recurrent Elements: Kraken and Bond

Holmes ties his story together with two persistent motifs. The initial he introduces early on – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short sonnet introduces ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, unutterable and sad, concealed beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a expert of verse and as the creator of images in which dreadful mystery is packed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.

The other theme is the contrast. Where the fictional creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant praise of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|