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Tennyson himself emerged as a torn soul. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, where dual aspects of the poet argued the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this revealing book, the author chooses to focus on the more obscure persona of the poet.

A Critical Year: 1850

In the year 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to two decades. Therefore, he became both renowned and wealthy. He wed, following a long courtship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his relatives, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying alone in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Then he took a house where he could entertain prominent callers. He became poet laureate. His life as a Great Man began.

Even as a youth he was commanding, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive

Lineage Turmoil

The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to emotional swings and melancholy. His parent, a reluctant minister, was irate and regularly drunk. There was an incident, the details of which are obscure, that caused the household servant being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and stayed there for life. Another suffered from profound despair and followed his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one in his own right.

The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson

Even as a youth he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a space. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings – three brothers to an small space – as an grown man he sought out solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for individual excursions.

Existential Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief

In that period, earth scientists, astronomers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the evolution, were posing frightening inquiries. If the story of living beings had started ages before the emergence of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for humanity, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The modern viewing devices and magnifying tools revealed spaces infinitely large and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such findings, in a deity who had formed humanity in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then might the mankind do so too?

Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Companionship

Holmes weaves his story together with dual recurrent motifs. The initial he introduces early on – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which terrible mystery is condensed into a few brilliantly indicative words.

The additional motif is the contrast. Where the mythical sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, wrist and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” built their nests.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|