Alfred Tennyson was a divided soul. He even wrote a poem called The Two Voices in which dual versions of himself argued out the pros and cons of suicide. In this illuminating book, Richard Holmes has chosen to focus on the lesser known of the poet\u2019s personae.<\/p>\n
The year 1850 was pivotal for Tennyson. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly two decades. He became, as a result, both famous and rich. He got married, after a 14\u2011year courtship. He had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or dossing down with bachelor friends in London, or lurking alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire\u2019s bleak beaches. Now he took a house where he could receive distinguished visitors. (When Prince Albert came calling, Tennyson was so far from obsequious that he forgot to invite the queen\u2019s consort to sit down, though he did at least offer the poor man a drink.) He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a Great Man began.<\/p>\n
For Holmes, this settling down \u2013 emotional, financial, social and poetical \u2013 is the end of the exciting part of Tennyson\u2019s life. The Boundless Deep is not about the bestselling author of the nation\u2019s favourite poem \u2013 The Charge of the Light Brigade \u2013 or the laureate lord, pacing along the clifftops of the Isle of Wight or posing for Julia Margaret Cameron\u2019s famous photograph (known derisorily in his family as \u201cthe dirty monk\u201d). Instead, Holmes gives us \u201cyoung Tennyson\u201d, the wildly talented youth whose story is far more rich and strange than that of the bearded celebrity.<\/p>\n
From his teens he was imposing, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome<\/p>\n
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a \u201cblack-blooded race\u201d, meaning prone to moods and melancholy. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was angry and very often drunk. There was an incident, the details of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred\u2019s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and stayed there for life. Another suffered from profound depression and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing gloom and what he called \u201cweird seizures\u201d. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he was or would become one himself.<\/p>\n
From his teens he was imposing, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a room. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings \u2013 three brothers to an attic room \u2013 as an adult he sought out solitude, retreating into silence when in company, vanishing for solitary walking tours.<\/p>\n
Holmes, master biographer that he is, vividly conjures up this awkward, compelling figure. What gives his book its exceptional energy, though, is not what is happening on the surface of\u00a0Tennyson\u2019s life and Holmes\u2019s narrative. It is the powerful undertow of threatened belief and existential anxiety tugging the reader down into the \u201cboundless deep\u201d of the title, where 19th-century thinkers wrestled with terrible thoughts. In 2008, Holmes published The Age of Wonder<\/a>, a group biography charting the way that Romantic poets responded to the discoveries of their scientific contemporaries such as Humphry Davy, William Herschel and Joseph Banks. That book was full of exuberant hopes. This one, set a generation later, is its darker, sadder sequel.<\/p>\n In Tennyson\u2019s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those \u201cnatural philosophers\u201d who were beginning to think with Darwin about the origin of species, were raising appalling questions. If the history of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been made for humanity\u2019s benefit and enjoyment? \u201cIt is inconceivable,\u201d wrote Tennyson, \u201cthat the whole Universe was merely created for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.\u201d The new telescopes and microscopes revealed spaces infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to hold to one\u2019s faith, given such evidence, in a God who had made man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then might the human race do so too?<\/p>\n These conundrums were repressed. It was hard to confront them in public without being accused of blasphemy, or in private without seeming to give way to despair. It is easy, in retrospect, to make fun of those 19th-century creationists who strove to believe that God had hidden the fossils in the rocks for some good, if inscrutable, reason. Holmes doesn\u2019t indulge in such patronising levity. He takes seriously the pain of those living through the crisis of faith, and writes about it with such sympathy that even his most secular-minded modern readers feel the shock of finding oneself alone and unloved in a God-forsaken universe.<\/p>\n Holmes binds his narrative together with two recurrent motifs. The first he introduces on his second page \u2013 it is the image of the Kraken, the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes\u2019s view, with its mix of \u201cNorse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations\u201d, the 15-line sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of human inquiry, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson\u2019s debut as a master of metre and as the creator of images in which awful mystery is compressed into a few dazzlingly suggestive words.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The second theme is the Kraken\u2019s opposite. Where the imaginary sea monster epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write \u201cI had no truer friend\u201d, summons up all that is affectionate and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with \u201cgrotesque grimness\u201d, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting \u201cdear old Fitz\u201d at home, wrote a thank-you letter in verse describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their \u201crosy feet \u2026 on shoulder, hand and knee\u201d, and even on his head. It\u2019s an image of pleasure nicely adapted to FitzGerald\u2019s great celebration of hedonism \u2013 his version of The Rub\u00e1iy\u00e1t of Omar Khayy\u00e1m. It also summons up the brilliant nonsense of the two poets\u2019 mutual friend Edward Lear. It\u2019s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear\u2019s rhyme about the old man with a beard in which \u201ctwo owls and a hen, four larks and a wren\u201d built their nests.<\/p>\n Holmes is not an uncritical fan \u2013 he is tart about the pseudo-medieval flim-flam of Idylls of the King \u2013 but when he loves a poem, he writes about it with a wonderful capacity for noticing every pulse of metre, every flicker of nuance. This biography is a compelling story of an odd, brilliant, charismatic character, and a reappraisal of a man who had become so very established we could no longer see him. In giving us young Tennyson \u2013 gauche, beautiful, veiled in stinking tobacco smoke \u2013 Holmes has given the great poet back to us.<\/p>\n