Overview

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize • In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes, critically acclaimed author of The Age of Wonder, discovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time. Tennyson rose to eminence as rapid and revolutionary discoveries were being made in the fields of biology, astronomy, geology, and marine science. It was a period of immense change akin to our own. For the first time, people were pursuing answers to questions that had felt previously unknowable—about biological evolution, the notion of a godless, unpitying universe, and of planetary extinction. These were as terrifying to Tennyson as climate catastrophe is to us today. It forced many to grapple with their understanding of the known world and their place within it and fostered a growing tension between religion and science. Tennyson’s work during these years is suffused with strangely modern magic, and in Holmes’ extraordinary biography, we witness Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering ideas about geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty, and terror of the new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution. Tennyson’s wild imagination and deep engagement with these concepts helped him emerge as the poetic voice of his generation—and he remains an inspiration for our own age.

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Reviews

“Brilliant. . . . Holmes depicts an intense, charismatic, intellectually curious young man whose poetry was infused with the revolutionary scientific discoveries of the day. . . . This shrewd, sensitive, beautifully written portrait provides a much-needed restoration of the human being beneath a barnacle-encrusted reputation. A must for poetry readers and a treat for anyone who enjoys fine literary biography.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize A Most Anticipated Book from Library Journal Named a Best Book of the Year by the Times, Daily Telegraph, Spectator, Financial Times, and Observer ""Absorbing. . . . The Boundless Deep is partly a retelling of the emotional cataclysm of the death of Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's beloved friend . . . But it is also the story of how what Tennyson called the ""terrible Muses"" of astronomy and geology alchemized this personal grief into a profound reckoning. Eventually, these twin crises of faith—theological and metaphysical—produced a poem, 'In Memoriam A.H.H.', that secured Tennyson's place at the pinnacle of Victorian culture—where he remains in popular memory, as a titled, lavishly bearded eminence. But for anxious, aimless years at a time, Holmes demonstrates, he seemed doomed to loneliness, doubt and willful eccentricity. . . . Holmes' empathetic rendering of the sadness and isolation of the first half of Tennyson's life makes it hard to begrudge him the cushioned respectability of the second. . . . [It] invites us to appreciate the remarkable fruits of his protracted estrangement."" —The New York Times ""[The Boundless Deep] tracks [Tennyson's] metabolic absorption of the most disturbing, displacing ideas that contemporary science had to offer; their effect on his personality; and their manifestation in his poetry. . . . [Holmes is a] master scholar-biographer. . . . In prose so lucid that you barely notice when it has slipped into a stream of profound interiority, into the hidden life-current of his subject, Holmes gives us what feels like the whole man."" —The Atlantic ""[Holmes is] a master of his craft."" —The New Yorker ""Holmes is a renowned biographer. . . [He] traces Tennyson's path through an imaginative world shaped as much by leading scientists of the day as by his literary contemporaries. . . . An emblem of Victorian respectability. . . . Tennyson has been happily forgotten by many 21st-century readers. The Boundless Deep succeeds in turning back the clock."" —Science “Brilliant. . . . Holmes depicts an intense, charismatic, intellectually curious young man whose poetry was infused with the revolutionary scientific discoveries of the day. . . . This shrewd, sensitive, beautifully written portrait provides a much-needed restoration of the human being beneath a barnacle-encrusted reputation. A must for poetry readers and a treat for anyone who enjoys fine literary biography.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “[Holmes] replaces the dusty usual portraits of the poet laureate . . . with a sparkling vision of him as an intelligent and imaginative man who welcomed in the new scientific age. Truly enriching.” —Sunday Times (London) “Holmes is probably our greatest chronicler of the Romantic poets. . . . The Boundless Deep is a dazzling and tireless work of advocacy.” —The Times (London) “Compelling. . . . A fascinating insight into a great British poet whose depths . . . remain boundless.” —Daily Telegraph “A spryly written but deeply learned biography.” —Spectator “There is an unusual, gentle mixture of imagination and empiricism in everything Holmes writes: a poetic sense of human psychology combined with a meticulous organized mind.” —New Statesman “The Boundless Deep shakes off the poet’s fusty image to reveal a young man grappling with the doubts of his age. . . . Holmes presents Tennyson as more interesting, more clever, more elusive and downright peculiar than modern readers may imagine.” —Observer

Author Information

RICHARD HOLMES is the author of The Age of Wonder, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Books Critics Circle Award, and was one of the New York Times Book Review‘s Best Books of the Year in 2009. Holmes’ other books include This Long Pursuit, Footsteps, Sidetracks, Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the James Tait Black Prize). He was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in England.

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