Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart
by Robert Bernard Martin
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The lyric perfection of the works of Alfred Tennyson, one of the greatest Victorian poets, and the apparent ease with which he wrote them, long obscured the disparity between the unruffled surface of many of his poems and his deeply disturbed life. Somersby Rectory, where Tennyson was born, was made miserable by drunkenness, drug addiction, threats of violence, melodramatic disinheritances, and above all by the fear of madness. He found an anodyne for his unhappiness in the composition of show more poetry, and was so successful in this refuge from the bewildering complexities of his life that he eventually became Poet Laureate and the most famous of living writers. Until he was forty years old the belief that he suffered from inherited epilepsy kept Tennyson unsettled, neurotic about money, immature in his relations with women, and apprehensive of marriage. It was a belief that gave shape to some of his finest poetry. At the end of his life Tennyson's wife and son constructed a public façade for him of irreproachable normality and respectability. Robert Bernard Martin was the first biographer to go behind the mask of the troubled poet to investigate his black-tempered morbidity, and neurotic secrecy about his private life. More importantly, it often reveals the sources of the successes and failures of the foremost Victorian poet. From many thousands of letters by Tennyson, his family, and his friends, as well as much other unpublished material, Robert Bernard Martin has distilled a sensitive and sympathetic portrait of Tennyson, both as his contemporaries saw him and as he was in private. 'Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart will stand as one of the great literary biographies of this century.' A. N. Wilson, The Spectator show lessTags
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1632 Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, by Robert Bernard Martin (read 11 May 1981) This book must rank as one of the great biographies I have read. It lacks little or nothing required for a great biography. Various of Tennyson's poems--Charge of the Light Brigade, The Brook, Locksley Hall, Tears, Idle Tears, Crossing the Bar--I have known by heart, and in my naive way some of his poetry I cannot fail to think surpassingly and unendingly beauteous. He was born Aug 6, 1809, at Somersby and died at 1:35 A.M. Oct 6, 1892. He never had any job other than writing, it would appear, and made a very good living at it. I could quote striking lines at great length, but a poem written after his son Lionel's death was new to me. It is entitled "To the show more Marquis of Dufferin and Ava and a line in the following verse thereof is sheerly great, I think:
"Beneath a hard Arabian moon
And alien stars. To question why
The sons before the father die,
Not mine! and I may meet him soon.
This book has been a sheer joy to read, though it paints the warts on Tennyson so clearly one cannot admire him much as a man. But it was all a biography should be. show less
"Beneath a hard Arabian moon
And alien stars. To question why
The sons before the father die,
Not mine! and I may meet him soon.
This book has been a sheer joy to read, though it paints the warts on Tennyson so clearly one cannot admire him much as a man. But it was all a biography should be. show less
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- Alfred Lord Tennyson
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