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Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided individual. He even composed a poem called The Two Voices, where contrasting versions of his personality debated the arguments of ending his life. In this insightful book, the author chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the poet.

A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century

The year 1850 became pivotal for Alfred. He released the great poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly two decades. Consequently, he grew both famous and prosperous. He entered matrimony, following a long courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he acquired a home where he could entertain distinguished guests. He became the official poet. His career as a renowned figure began.

Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking

Family Challenges

The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting susceptible to moods and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was volatile and regularly intoxicated. There was an incident, the facts of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for life. Another experienced profound melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured episodes of paralysing despair and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a lunatic: he must frequently have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.

The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could command a space. But, being raised crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he craved privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in groups, retreating for solitary walking tours.

Existential Anxieties and Upheaval of Faith

In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening queries. If the story of life on Earth had begun ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the world had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely formed for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and lenses revealed realms infinitely large and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s belief, in light of such evidence, in a God who had formed humanity in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then would the mankind follow suit?

Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Companionship

The author weaves his account together with two recurring elements. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something vast, unspeakable and sad, concealed inaccessible of human inquiry, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the author of symbols in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.

The additional element is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, palm and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a beard in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a wren” built their nests.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|