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 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 facade 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friends, as well as much other unpublished material, Robert Bernard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"
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