Tennyson by Robert Bernard Martin
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 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 From many thousands of letters by Tennyson, his family, and his friends, as well as much other unpublished material, Robert Bernard Martin has distilled a sensitive and sympathetic portrait of Tennyson, both as his contemporaries saw him and as he was in private.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
Robert Bernard Martin (1918-1999) was born in Illinois. He had a distinguished academic career and was Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton University, USA, from 1951 to 1975, before retiring to Oxford, where he became a writer. He published ten books about the Victorian era, including biographies such as Tennyson, the Unquiet Heart in 1980 and A Very Private Life in 1991.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780571251940 |
| ISBN 10 | 0571251943 |
| Title | Tennyson |
| Author | Robert Bernard Martin |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber |
| Year published | 2009-06-18 |
| Number of pages | 680 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |