The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief

by Richard Holmes

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE*

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE*

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE*

A Book of the Year in the Times; Telegraph; Spectator; Financial Times; Observer; Waterstones and Daunt Books

A dazzling new biography of young Tennyson by the prize-winning, bestselling author of The Age of Wonder.

Alfred Lord Tennyson is now remembered – if he is remembered at all – as the gloomily bearded Poet Laureate, author of such clanking Victorian works as ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, and the mournful author of the lugubrious elegy In Memoriam. In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes reawakens this somnolent Victorian figure, brings him back to sparkling life, and unexpectedly transforms him.

From the prize-winning and bestselling biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, and author of the landmark, critically acclaimed THE AGE OF WONDER, Holmes recovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man but now haunted by the great intellectual – and above all the great scientific – issues of his time.

The brilliant child of an obscure dysfunctional Lincolnshire family, terrorised by a drunken father, torn by unhappy love affairs but sustained by vivid friendships (especially that of Edward FitzGerald, the author of ‘Omar Khayyam’) Young Tennyson emerges in his first forty years as a memorable poet, hypnotically musical (‘The Lady of Shalott’) yet intensely engaged with the new astronomy, geology, biology – and even the psychiatry – of the age before Darwin.

Tennyson’s imagination and intellect were haunted by the eruption of three new fundamentally transformative scientific ideas – 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. Their impact brought him into contact with the life and scientific work of William Whewell (originally his university tutor), the astronomer John Herschel, the geologist Charles Lyell, the mathematician Mary Somerville, the computer pioneer Charles Babbage, and the brilliant science populariser Robert Chambers. He also shared his visions and anxieties with contemporary writers and social commentators like Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, and poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Edgar Allan Poe.

Tennyson’s work during these ‘vagrant years’ is suffused with an unsuspected and strangely modern magic. Holmes’s extraordinary biography allows us to witness Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering ideas of geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty and terror of the new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution. And how these inspired him to grapple with the idea of human mortality, the threat of suicide and depression, the struggle between love and loneliness, agnosticism and belief.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Science, Poetry, Audiobook, Biography Memoir

429 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 25, 2025

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Lydia Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Examines how Tennyson wrestled with new, "radical" ideas regarding evolution, deep time, and a potentially godless universe.
Chronicles his emotional life, including the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam, which influenced his poetry. Portrays the poet not as a stuffy Victorian figure, but as a "magnetic and mercurial" young man facing intellectual upheaval. Explores how these scientific and personal crises shaped his early masterpieces. Look into the personal and intellectual, rather than just the public, life of the poet. Highly recommend.

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new perspective on the Victorian poet that shows how the scientific discoveries of this period influenced his writings and faith.

[Alex Sarll]

Holmes' acknowledgements mention that this book began during the Event, when we were none of us at our best; combine this with the general decline of editing and it may explain a few infelicities early on, from Charles Darwin as Erasmus' nephew to the Book of 'Revelations', which are otherwise inexplicable from such an accomplished writer. More generally, there's a tendency for sentences that look as if they started out facing one way, ended up somewhere else, and never got fully reconciled afterwards. And even once that's settled down, occasional repetitions remain, not to mention a peculiar tendency to introduce characters piecemeal, so that for their first two or three appearances we'll get a different parenthetical detail about them each time. Perhaps strangest of all, though, is the very concept of a biography of Young Tennyson. This isn't like Holmes' Coleridge in two volumes; it's determinedly a standalone book, but one which firmly focuses on Alfred Tennyson before, at the third time of offering, 'Lord' went in the middle. And where does Holmes place the cut-off point? It's not some footling little detail like that ennoblement, or marriage, or becoming Poet Laureate. It's not even the pusillanimous prologue which attempted to make In Memoriam's dark night of the soul more palatable to complacent Victorians in general and the future in-laws in particular. No; it's the beard. Look at the cover, cutting off the one portrait of young Alfred so as to emphasise the visibility of his chin. As someone who also had mine on show in my Cambridge days, and has now grown a big old beard (albeit nowhere near as big or old as ALT's) I must declare an interest here, but even so, what the actual?

Still, beneath all that lurks an appropriate 2020s sequel to Holmes' great, giddy noughties Age Of Wonder. There he showed us how the new scientific discoveries of their time energised the Romantics; here he shows us how the next wave unsettled and alarmed their heirs, astronomy and geology and evolution gradually stripping away any notion of humanity's centrality or divine purpose, all the old consolations foundering in the vast, freshly apprehended gulfs of deep time and deep space. Tennyson's magnificent early poem about the Kraken is the central image here, made all the more apt by its author's seeming reluctance to reprint it – though at times it can become too multivalent a concept, variously invoked by Holmes to represent the terror of the new science; Tennyson's own lurking melancholy and family pattern of worse; and even once, bizarrely, his stillborn firstborn. There's also a strange absence of the obvious term 'cosmic horror' in relation to any of this, which I initially took for genre snobbery, but Holmes is happy to admit the science fiction content in a poem such as the great Locksley Hall, and even to reference Jurassic Park by name, so perhaps he's genuinely unaware of it. While I'm on what seems to have become a second catalogue of complaints, I may as well also note that the book is firmly, even obliviously 'no homo' regarding the friendship between Tennyson and poor, doomed Arthur Hallam which would provide the spur for the magnificent act of mourning that was In Memoriam. Although, in fairness, Holmes does at least provide the hetero detail of Hallam's prior romance with one Anna Wintour and yes, obviously I'm picturing the modern one. It's not just the protagonist, either; there's no hint that Tennyson's youthful friend, and later more complicated acquaintance, Edward FitzGerald might have had any ulterior motive for all that hanging around with fishermen, and I think the only hint of any of that sort of thing is a single line about Edward Lear which doesn't even take the opportunity for a dong pun.

And yet, and yet, despite all of that, this was worth a read, as a portrait through one man of a changing age, how new discoveries unsettled a generation and then sent them in retreat, if not quite into Lovecraft's new dark age, then at least into the firm pieties we think of when we say 'Victorian'. Holmes is very good on the poems, too – what influenced them, their reception, the many revisions, and the metrical inventiveness which can sometimes sound clodhopping to modern ears but which did so much to make Tennyson beloved at every level of his society, where even those without copies of their own could learn his thundering rhythms or rolling elegies by heart. Perversely, though, I come away chiefly tempted by late Arthurian epic Idylls Of The King, Holmes' evident distaste for which seems to be the other big reason he chopped off the account where he did.

[Bethan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not entirely bad but what annoyed me (hence my ungenerous rating) was that whilst it's an interesting premise trying to link Tennyson's poetry to science, half of the time I felt gaslit even after reading a quote two or three times. It was shoehorning and bullshitting half the time. Tennyson, who is a wonderful poet, wrote a lot that was simply romantic, dramatic and nature pictorials.

As a biography, it was OK although uneven, as if Holmes couldn't decide whether to stick to a book about Victorian science or to write a biography of Tennyson instead of mashing them together. Think it would have been better being one or the other. A standard biography that includes Tennyson's interest in the sciences and the more obvious quotes would have been just fine. There's interesting family background and Holmes does a good job of painting a picture of what Tennyson and his life was like - I came out feeling like that I had a good sense of that.

There's a strange and mildly interesting focus on Edward FitzGerald at the end especially since Tennyson didn't seem that keen on FitzGerald back at that point. Maybe because Holmes had access to FitzGerald letters and therefore had more material to write about or is hinting that there might have been something between them - but if so, it appears to be from FitzGerald only. I would rather that Holmes had addressed that more directly. Hallam of course is still a mystery and that's touched upon, again indirectly: was it a deep and platonic friendship with no romantic or sexual feelings -having experienced it, I know that happens - or something more? (My instinct is that it was the former especially given that Tennyson wrote overtly romantic poems about women and seemed to have a happy marriage with no real hints of liaisons with other men.)

2.5 - 1 star for a lot of the literary criticism, 2 stars for the structure/focus of the book, 3-4 stars for the standard biography and history stuff.

[Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It was as if astronomy had become for him the alternative frontier of hope in the new Victorian world of military empire and colonial expansion. Instead of the old dark menace of the deep-sea Kraken, he turned to the radiant new light overhead.”

After reading through much of Tennyson's vast body of work, it was fascinating to learn more about his life through The Boundless Deep. Witnessing his early brilliance, his melancholy-tinged enthusiasm for life and his wonderfully developed imagination, further enlivened his poetry in my mind. I had no idea the developing sciences, especially the observations of the natural world and the astronomical heavens, were so woven into his verse. Even though I read and loved so much of Tennyson's work, it wasn't until this book that he became in my mind vibrant and real in his own right, alongside his writing and apart from it.

Holmes is beautifully descriptive in his own writing. He presents Tennyson in a way that vividly conveys his bright vivacity and his tense balance on the edge of melancholy as he watched so many in his family succumb to mental illness. He also has a wonderful way of shedding light on some of Tennyson's more implacable pieces via providing historical context, as well as biographical context from Tennyson's own life at the point during which each piece was written. "Timbuctoo," Tennyson's first major, public publication, is a prime example. This is a poem that eluded me when I first read it, but now makes far more sense in light of what I read in this book. I also found here a greater understanding of both Maud and In Memoriam, two of his longer works that I originally found opaque and difficult.

Rarely have I read a biography that was this compelling, accessible, and well written. Not only do I have a much deeper grasp of and appreciation for Tennyson, I feel like I learned so much about the burgeoning natural sciences of the Victorian era. Holmes did a brilliant job with The Boundless Deep, and I look forward to reading his work on Shelley and Coleridge.

[Autumn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75. Phew! That was a bit of a slog to read but also I couldn’t quite quit this biography of young Tennyson. Fascinating to see how he grew into a poet so associated with the Victorian age by engaging with the rapidly changing science around him and battling his own depression. “Cosmology, benign or malignant, fantastical of empiracal, always led Tennyson back to the eternal questions.” p.227

So much of the poetry is so familiar as to be English language now but dealt with scientific terms - “Let the great world spin” is about trains! - and wrestling - “honest doubt.” Or just trying to understand the world - “nature red in tooth and claw” - as it is revealed. The book doesn’t even touch on his most well known poems with the exception of The Charge of the Light Brigade.

My personal favorite newly discovered poem:

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’s with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Though I doubt I’ll quote it as much as it is better to have loved and lost…

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Biography That Reads Like Weather: “The Boundless Deep” Turns Tennyson From Marble Statue Into Living Nervous System
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 10th, 2026


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

Richard Holmes’s new biography, “The Boundless Deep,” begins by refusing the most convenient version of Alfred Tennyson – the version that comes pre-carved, beard-forward, already mounted on a plinth. Holmes has always been suspicious of statues. His gift is to make a canonical life feel newly physical: to turn reputations back into weather, debts, ink stains, rooms with poor light, and the long, indecisive walk that precedes a line. Here, his subject is the Victorian poet as a nervous system – porous, brilliant, easily overwhelmed – learning, over decades, how to survive the pressures that modernity applies to the human mind.

The book is marketed as a life of Tennyson, but it reads as something closer to a study in scale: how a single consciousness tries to live inside three immensities at once. There is private time – the family world of Somersby, the dense, tender, ridiculous texture of young friendships at Cambridge. There is historical time – monarchy, empire, public office, the state’s appetite for art that flatters its own story. And then there is deep time, the cold, thrilling, destabilizing vastness that 19th-century science made newly unavoidable: geology’s distances, evolution’s indifferent arithmetic, the cosmos as an idea that can either crush you or console you, depending on the shape of your faith and the steadiness of your days. Holmes is too tactful a writer to announce this architecture as thesis. He builds it the way he builds everything else: by walking you through it until it feels like the only honest way to tell the story.

Holmes’s Tennyson is not “born” a poet so much as continuously re-made by circumstance. “Somersby” and “Cambridge” arrive with a kind of pastoral brightness, but it’s never pure idyll. The young Tennyson is already marked by anxiety – by family instability, by the sense that the future is both immense and precarious. Cambridge is not simply a setting; it is a pressure chamber in which a voice begins to develop alongside friendships that are intellectual, emotional, and fiercely formative. Holmes is particularly good at this early material: the way a mind learns its own powers in rooms full of other minds, the way aesthetic ambition can feel like oxygen and threat at once. If you’ve read Holmes’s earlier work, particularly “The Age of Wonder,” you’ll recognize his talent for making intellectual history intimate without making it small. Ideas are never disembodied – they arrive through people, conversations, books handled and re-handled until the margins go soft.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

Then Edward Hallam dies, and the biography becomes something else entirely. Many lives of poets treat grief as a crucible – a necessary misery that forges greatness. Holmes is too humane, and too observant, for that romance. Hallam’s death is not a poetic engine. It is an implosion. It does not make Tennyson better. It almost makes him silent. Holmes tracks the aftermath with a quiet insistence that feels, in its own way, like a corrective to centuries of literary mythmaking. The poet collapses into debt, paralysis, shame. He becomes less a bard than a man pinned down by his own sensitivity and the material facts of living. If “Breakdown” is the book’s crater, it is also the book’s ethical center: Holmes refuses to aestheticize mental illness. He shows what it costs – to families, to friendships, to the fragile machinery of work. Recovery, when it comes, is not epiphany. It is routine, help, the slow re-threading of days.

This is where the book begins to feel uncannily contemporary, though Holmes never winks at the present. Tennyson’s crisis is Victorian, but the shape of it – the overload, the perfectionism, the debilitating fear of public judgment, the financial precarity that turns every creative decision into a moral calculation – could be lifted cleanly into our moment of anxious productivity and omnipresent evaluation. Even the way Holmes describes the re-entry into work feels like a diagnosis of modern creative life. The most difficult part, he suggests, is not the early struggle or the first success, but the long middle: staying sane, staying honest, staying able to produce when the world is watching and your nervous system is already on fire.

“In Memoriam” sits at the gravitational center of “The Boundless Deep,” and Holmes treats it less as masterpiece than as a kind of prolonged grief practice – a decades-long negotiation between love and meaning, between belief and the encroaching evidence of a universe that does not particularly care. The poem is famous, of course, for its mourning, but Holmes is especially sharp on its philosophical pressure: the way scientific thought forces the elegy to widen into something like an argument with time itself. Here the book’s title begins to hum. The “boundless deep” is not only the sea of Victorian imagery. It is the widening of perspective that modern knowledge demands: the dawning recognition that loss is not only personal, but structural, embedded in a world where extinction is natural and the stars are indifferent.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

Holmes does not turn this into a simple story of lost faith. He is subtler than that, and more interested in practice than position. The mind, he shows, can hold doubt and still do daily life. It can fear the abyss and still make a home. That home – marriage, children, steadiness – is one of the book’s most quietly radical claims. Holmes is writing against the tortured genius myth with the soft power of accumulation. Again and again, the evidence suggests that Tennyson writes best when he is stable. Not euphoric, not inspired in fits, but secure enough to revise, patient enough to build. Marriage is not sentimental decoration; it is infrastructure. Fatherhood is not merely biographical color; it is discipline. The domestic world becomes the shield against public life and existential panic. The romance of suffering is replaced by something both less glamorous and more true: the craft of endurance.

Holmes is admirably unshowy about this argument, but it’s hard to miss the pattern. When Tennyson is drowning in fear or debt, the work stalls or fractures. When he has routine and support, the work deepens. Greatness, in this portrait, is not a blaze but a long burn – not an event but a capacity. If this sounds like the language of contemporary conversations about burnout, sustainability, creative labor, and the backlash against hustle mythology, that’s because Holmes has written a Victorian life that behaves like a modern case study. Without ever dragging in the present, he shows how the structures around an artist – money, privacy, partnership, time – determine what art is possible.

The latter part of the book widens into public life and begins to test a new tension: the difference between writing because you must and writing because you’re expected to. Holmes’s chapters on Tennyson as a public figure – the publication success of “In Memoriam,” the sudden swell of national attention, and the appointment as Poet Laureate – are bracing precisely because they refuse to treat honors as uncomplicated triumph. Holmes has an eye for the deflating detail that keeps myth at bay. A ceremony becomes a moment of ill-fitting clothing and social discomfort. Public office becomes the arrival of requests, obligations, the state’s desire for usable verse. The poet who spent years refining private music is now asked to supply public soundtracks.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

There are passages here that feel like an early blueprint for our own age of compelled commentary, where artists and writers are expected to respond instantly and publicly to every event – to be moral instruments, brand symbols, national weather vanes. Holmes’s Tennyson is not built for that kind of constant visibility. He is introverted, easily bruised, and hungry for the solitude in which real work happens. Holmes shows him learning a compromise: how to accept a public role without becoming entirely public, how to make a life where the home still protects the voice.

If empire is the loudest of those public pressures, it is also where Holmes is at his most delicately skeptical. The chapter “Empires” doesn’t turn into an extended political lecture. Holmes is not writing a polemic. But he understands how the machinery of nationhood can fossilize art into rhetoric. The Laureate is asked to write the sound of empire, to dignify spectacle with language. Tennyson complies at times, and Holmes doesn’t hide the flatness that can result when duty outruns inspiration. Yet Holmes also suggests that public obligation can redirect private ambition, funneling it toward mythic forms – the Arthurian dream resurfacing as a way to think about power, honor, and national story without being fully trapped by contemporary politics.

Then Holmes does something elegant: he takes us away from empire and up into the sky. “Stars” is one of the book’s quiet masterpieces, and it completes the science arc that has haunted the biography since its early geology tremors. Tennyson, we see, has held the scientific vastness as threat for years. Now, through astronomy, it becomes consolation. There is something tender in Holmes’s depiction of the Laureate peering through telescopes, drawing Orion, instructing Emily with boyish excitement. The cosmic scale that once triggered dread now produces awe. This is not a conversion in the usual sense. It is a recalibration – meaning made not through certainty, but through attention. In an era saturated with new forms of vastness – algorithmic, ecological, technological – it’s difficult not to feel the relevance. Holmes suggests that modernity’s scale is survivable if you learn to look at it without panic.

As a work of literary biography, “The Boundless Deep” belongs on the shelf with the best examples of the form – biographies that combine scholarship with style, and refuse to treat intellect as separate from life. Hermione Lee’s “Virginia Woolf” comes to mind for psychological precision and narrative restraint; so does Charlotte Gordon’s “Romantic Outlaws” for the way a life can be rendered with novelistic momentum without sacrificing complexity. Holmes’s closest kin may be Edmund de Waal’s “The Hare With Amber Eyes,” not because the subjects overlap, but because both writers understand how objects and places carry emotional charge, how history becomes real through texture. And if one wants a comp that captures the particular way Holmes braids science into human story, “The Invention of Nature” offers a similar blend of wonder and intellectual upheaval. But Holmes remains distinct. His method is less panoramic than tactile – he gives you not the lecture but the footstep, not the abstract argument but the wind off the coast as an idea takes hold.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

What makes Holmes’s style so persuasive is his refusal to simplify his subject into either saint or neurotic. Tennyson is vain and shy, tender and stubborn, serious and occasionally ridiculous. Holmes’s prose accommodates contradiction. He doesn’t build a single “explanation” for the poet’s life. He shows the constant negotiation between temperament and circumstance, between inner weather and outer demand. This gives the book its most valuable quality: trust. You feel that Holmes is not arranging the evidence to flatter a thesis. He is listening to the life.

That said, the very steadiness that makes the biography humane can, at points, soften its sharpness. There are moments when one wishes for a more sustained confrontation with the moral mechanics of empire – not because Holmes avoids the topic, but because he often chooses the interior over the structural. Similarly, the book’s late emphasis on balance and domestic infrastructure can make the narrative feel almost too composed, as if Holmes is smoothing rough edges rather than leaving them jagged. Yet it’s also possible that this is a deliberate artistic choice: Holmes is writing a book that refuses the sensational pleasures of collapse and scandal. He is writing toward quiet resolution, toward the rare story in which a fragile mind learns to live.

The closing “Sources” section, treated as chapter rather than appendix, underscores this anti-myth impulse. Holmes steps out of the narrative spell and shows the scaffolding: letters, manuscripts, records, the material remnants from which any life story must be built. It is a cool ending, archival in temperature, but conceptually precise. Holmes seems to be saying: the statue is made of paper. The legend is a filing system. You can admire the life without worshiping the myth.

If “The Boundless Deep” has a single, prevailing emotional effect, it is the comfort of realism. It does not promise that grief ends, or that doubt disappears, or that public life becomes easy. It shows something rarer: that a life can become sturdy. That meaning can be built through repetition, love, work, and attention. That science can widen the world without erasing the self. Holmes’s book is not perfect, but it is quietly extraordinary in its blend of tenderness, intelligence, and narrative control – a biography that makes a canonical figure feel newly vulnerable and newly useful. My overall assessment lands at 91/100, not because it offers a flawless monument, but because it dismantles monuments and replaces them with something better: a human being moving, slowly, toward steadiness under an immense sky.

[David C Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Victorians - the intelligentsia at least - are exhausting: the continual sense of inquiry and self ( and societal) examination and improvement, the ceaseless activities ranging from book clubs to scientific exhibitions combining with a nervosity that infected a class coming to grips with uncertainty, both societal and cosmological. They never could just take a walk! So Holmes teases out Tennyson’s poetic beginnings linking them with his scientific curiosity, his crisis of faith, and its reconciliation. Holmes is a good reader although he does tend to gush over Tennyson - a paragraph or two about whether the modern reader can penetrate the poet’s metrics (thud, thud) is about all he allows by way of criticism.
But: I know we have too much of gender (and s*x) these days but I find it amazing that Holmes has absolutely nothing to say about the homosocial (and homosexual) world of young Englishmen as it pertains to AT’s love for Arthur Hallam, his lifelong personal and poetic obsession. (Much of the book is given over to AT’s anguished composition of the very long poem, “In Memoriam (To AH)” He named his first son Hallam!) Even more, it’s only revealed with a throwaway line toward the end that AT’s great friend Edward FitzGerald, who slowly disappears from AT’s orbit especially after the poet marries, is actively homosexual. A lot of Tennyson’s internal conflicts - including his depressive collapses, his restlessness and inability to settle, his difficulties with girls and late marriage - could be unknotted if this issue was fairly faced by the biographer. You don’t have to be Victorian to write about the Victorians, I would hope.

[Matt McCormick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holmes provided me with a new perspective on Tennyson. Clearly, I had limited knowledge of his work, only being appreciative of the more epic poems - Ulysses has always been a favorite. The breadth of Tennyson's interests and poetry is impressive.
Tennyson should be reappreciated in our troubled environmental times. He spoke not only of the beauty of nature but also of its sublime wonder. "He clasps the crag with crooked hands;/Close to the sun in lonely lands,/Ring'd with the azure world, he stands./The winkled sea beneath him crawls;/He watches from his mountain walls./And like a thunderbolt he falls."
The reader will find a story of an idiosyncratic individual who was fortunate to have many genuine friends. Those friends likely saved a man who obviously struggled with mental illness from a sad fate. Throughout the book, the reader will meet a montage of artists, scientists, and thinkers - Dickens, FitzGerald, E.B. Browning, Lyle, Darwin, Herschel, and Waterhouse.
Holmes did a terrific job bringing Tennyson to life and his Victorian times to life.

[Keenan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Boundless Deep details the young life of the sentimental and archetypically Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson, along with the various literary characters in his orbit and the scientific and political influences of his early writing. The austere figure I believed him to be contrasts strongly with the younger man chronicled herein; a wayward soul with a family history of mental instability, a man ever reluctant to publish deeply personal poems about religious doubt and heartbreaking loss, a poet deeply influenced by the earth-shattering breakthroughs of the time in geology, astrology, and evolution. This book goes into detail about the broody smoking genius, and goes into depth to add important context to some of his most powerful stanzas and verses. A bit thick on the biographical side, I was quite fond of the offshoot explanations of the mixing worlds of science and literature and the controversies in both spaces that emerged from the changing times.

[Ernie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Boundless Deep
Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief
by Richard Holmes

Born in the same year as Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, through his poetry and the famous images of him with a full Victorian beard, wind blown long hair, wide-brimmed black hat and long cloak, never appeared in my mind’s eye as the tall, fashionable young student at Cambridge, or the hard drinking and pipe chain-smoking poet couch surfing, dancing and charming all with his dramatic recitations of his poems around London in the 1830’s and 40’s. Nor could I have expected the young penniless idealist and his rich best friend Arthur Hallam walking through the Pyrenees, carrying secret letters and funds for Spanish revolutionaries. However, as Richard Holmes is my favourite literary biographer, this pleasant surprise is only expected as he explores the connections between young Tennyson’s years ‘before the beard’, as Holmes puts it and the old poet Laureate.

Moreover, I did not realise the close connections between Tennyson and the great British scientists of that age, Herschel and Lyell, revolutionaries in geology and astronomy, let alone those eminent Victorians Carlyle and Mill who wrote the first significant and praising review of the young man’s first publication. With fascinating, forensic details drawn from the poems, Holmes reveals the wealth of the images and references to sea wind and air that I remember but the poetic curiosity that related them to the geology that was still making the rocky cave walls smooth with the waves and the cliff with the sand. And also his interest and close observation of the wave motion that shaped the water, the sounds, the music and the echoes. Holmes cites the many scientific books bought and read by Tennyson from a young age whose interest in both poetry and science was encouraged by his clergyman father who had all his eleven children write poetry and bound their poems into a notebook. He gave his middle son Alfred a microscope and telescope. The four brothers slept in the rectory attic with a skylight where they could observe the stars and the youth would soon be using scientific terminology in his poems: ‘There sinks the nebulous star we call the sun’; ‘Murmurs from the dying sun’.

Later in life, in learned conversations with Victorians like Carlye who scornfully dismissed the creation myths in Genesis, he would even write, ‘It is inconceivable that the whole Universe was merely created for us who live on a third-rate planet of a third rate star.’ He talked about deep time, the very latest astronomical discoveries provided by the new giant telescope that was the largest in the world until after the end of the 19th century. ‘Time a maniac scattering dust/And Life a fury slinging flame.’ Humans, too will be fossils, ‘seal’d within the iron hills.’ Nature, not God is the bringer of life and death:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean breath.
It was the poet rather than the scientist who wrote eight years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species.:
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law-
Tho Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.


I re-read Break, break, break on thy cold grey stones, oh sea, the echo calls form castle walls and the eagle poems with new eyes and ears. The sea coast and river water in my brain for my whole lifetime resonates with ‘the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls/He watches from his mountain walls/And like a thunderbolt he falls’.
Although his father’s home was in a town, Somersby, Lincolnshire, from boyhood onwards, Alfred, boy and man, long after the rectory had been vacated, used to walk or ride 15 miles to the tiny fishing village of Maplethorpe to stay, mostly alone for the solitude and to write. There was not even a postal service. By the iron dark North Sea he walked the sands and sometimes swam. His first published poem The Kraken, at age 18 has the deep sea creature rise up like a monster from the depths, decades before Jules Vernes and H G Wells.

The assonance of the sea and the wind carries the rhymes and rhythms that make so much of his poetry able to be memorised easily. ‘Memorable words’, is a good definition of poetry and the Victorians with their new schools established a tradition of teaching poetry through recitation, choral speech and learning by rote that carried over into my generation before it was almost snuffed out by the modernists. This was another reason why Tennyson began to enjoy unprecedented sales of major poems like Mariana and The Lady of Shallot, Maud, the Princess and In Memorium which sold 50,000 copies in the first six months.

Like many poets, Tennyson often had to be stopped from editing his work and was afraid to publish but gems like The Eagle were written in a few minutes. This time Holmes verified this from the 41 year old, soon to be Laureate’s visit to Mrs Wordsworth after the death of her old Laureate husband. She asked Alfred to write in her visitor’s book where his poem was perhaps composed on the spot. After editing and changing the order of the In Memoriam stanzas many times and finally censoring number 56, he added a long boring prologue which Holmes describes as being like a great organ peal of Anglican faith, ‘shockingly orthodox’, in direct contradiction to much that followed.

Holmes wrote that this is ‘the most bewildering document that the young Tennyson ever wrote… (or) the first document written by the old Tennyson’. Tennyson then asked for a private printing of only six copies for the first, anonymous and restricted edition for his friends and Emily Sellwood, the Somersby girl friend in whose hand many first drafts of stanzas had been copied and to whom he had sent the tender lullaby Sweet and Low which she had set to music as many others did later. Her father had a decade earlier rejected Alfred as too poor a prospect for her marriage. Was the prologue just for him and Emily? Holmes suggests that it was like a proposal and if it were, it worked as they were swiftly married eight months later after the first public edition. This was still anonymous, not even identifying A.H.H as Arthur Hallam, his best friend, shockingly dead at 22, in Vienna seventeen years earlier. The poems had long been kept secret from all but his closest friends, presumably for revealing too many shocks to Victorian religious faith. Queen Victoria requested a copy and declared that it remained on her bedside table and was also a favourite of Prince Albert.

This person was no longer the youth who had to be asked to take his feet off the table at the Reform Club or spent several hours alone with Mrs Carlyle, with his feet on her couch, talking and declaiming his poems. Soon came the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington and The Charge of the Light Brigade, fatherhood, the Isle of Wight house, the beard and Prince Albert dropping in unannounced to the consternation of the housemaid.

[Kevin Crowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a boy growing up in the 1050s and 60s, one of the first (if not the first) poets I discovered and enjoyed was Alfred (Lord) Tennyson. I fell in love with the mysterious and enigmatic "The Lady of Shalott" the first time I read it. Also loved his "Mort D'Arthur", "Ulysses", "The Brook" and later discovered "In Memoriam" (from which the famous phrase "Nature red in tooth and claw" comes), "Maud" and much else. I still regularly revisit his poetry, finding something new each time, and probably the only poet I rate higher than Tennyson is William Blake.

So when I saw a new biography of Tennyson was to be published, I immediately ordered it. I wasn't disappointed! Richard Holmes "The Boundless Deep" concentrates on the younger Tennyson, from his childhood to the first few years of his role as Poet Laureate. Holmes believes that some of Tennyson's later poetry wasn't up to the same quality as his earlier poetry (I don't necessarily agree: there is a lot to like in his Arthurian "Idylls to the King"). He is also particularly interested in the role of science - and particularly geology, astronomy and evolutionary theory - in Tennyson's poetry. Despite my love of his poetry, this was something I had never thought about, but rereading Tennyson in the light of Holmes' analysis, I can see how right the biographer is.

So often science and the arts are seen as being opposites, yet even a few moments' thought will show this isn't the case. Without Maths there would probably not be poetry: numbers are important when writing in metrical forms (number of syllables, number of stresses, number of lines, etc). The same applies to music. Without geometry, painters would not be able to create perspective in their art. Scientific advances have made it easier for painters to create colour, for musicians and actors to be heard, for writers to get their work to the public, etc. Science has helped creatives reach audiences whether through the printing press, broadcasting, electronics and much else. It has also helped us preserve great works of art. Creatives themselves have helped spread and popularise scientific ideas.

Holmes shows how Tennyson was fascinated by science and how he incorporated it into his poetry. His poetry is packed with references to geological ages, the natural world and the universe we are a part of. It is there in all his best poetry and informs his approach to writing and the subjects he chose to write about. Tennyson also reflects on the effect scientific discovery has on religious faith, with at times him coming close to atheism (or at least agnosticism), at other times suggesting that science can deepen faith. And he does all this in highly personal poetry like "In Memoriam" as well as tales about heroes and heroines.

One of Tennyson's most controversial poems, at least for modern readers, is "Charge of the Light Brigade", about the 600 men who were told to charge heavily fortified Russian positions, with the result that most of the British forces were massacred. The poem is often seen as being jingoistic. However, I have always disagreed with that assessment, feeling that whereas Tennyson acknowledges the courage of the men who died, he also criticises those who ordered the charge. Indeed, the line "Someone had blundered" followed by the famous lines "Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die..." suggest that he was critical of those who sent the men to their deaths. I am pleased to see that Holmes agrees with me in his analysis of this fine poem.

This new biography has helped me to understand and appreciate even more the work of one of my favourite poets. And surely you can't ask more of a biography.

[Greg Talbot · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Boundless Deep" is a sweeping epic on the late Romantic period. After the brilliant "Age of Wonder", in which Holmes wrote about scientific giants like William Herschel and Joseph Banks, the lens is now turned to the poetry of British poet Alfred Tennyson. Revealing in layers of history, the scientific foundations of cosmology and geology, and the intricate complexities of human relations, Holmes presents in Alfred Tennyson a singular figure to bridge the order of natural law to the skeptical agnosticism of modernity.

For the more poetry-inclined, this is a fantastic book to explore the story and work of Tennyson. Holmes goes into stanzas of poems like "The Kraken", "The Two Voices", and "Maud", and explores how the themes of the poems connect to his life events as well as the scientific revelations. We get descriptions of his boyish escapades to the Mablethorpe coast, the literary ambitions and success at Trinity College, the friendships with Arthur Hallam and Edward FitzGerald that helped establish his identity, and the processing of empire and theology in an age staring into the abyss — and his late epics that would establish him as a writer of empire itself.

The shattering of the Victorian worldview — the primacy of human beings in a God-centric universe — appears in Tennyson's work. We sense the struggle of faith, or of order at least, while trying to honor the revelations of Darwinism and the exhumation of species in the fossil record. The introduction of "deep time" introduces wonder and terror into our lives. There is a similar sense of fragility in our culture, sometimes under the banner of the "polycrisis" — the multiple catastrophes of the liberal order: climate change, political division, and the unraveling of purpose and meaning. Some of Tennyson's work in the chapter "Asylum", in which Tennyson explores the perturbations of sanity, undoubtedly influenced by two brothers who were institutionalized, seems to explore new depths of feeling and an embrace of extreme emotions. We sense in Tennyson, over and again, how states of grief and decline become the centering emotional states of his most influential work.

Make no mistake, this is an entertaining but difficult read. Maybe the readership is well versed in nineteenth-century poetry, but I would imagine many more readers, like myself, were effortfully trying to make sense of Tennyson's life, and making sense of the poems was an added hurdle. There is no need to water down the material, but I think Holmes's decision to put Tennyson in the story's foreground limits the reader's focus on the wider happenings around his life. I think there were some opportunities for Holmes to address issues outside of a narrative flow, such as how Tennyson explored progressive humanist ideas or contemplated his fame and the admiration from other writers like Emerson or Poe. I have a sense of why Tennyson matters as one of the great poets, but I think there was a missed opportunity to share why Tennyson matters to modern audiences.

[Charles Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would have been easy for Holmes, a respected scholar, to sensationalize this subject matter with references in the title to Arthur Hallam, same-sex attraction, or In Memoriam, the eulogy for Hallam that Tennyson perfected over seventeen years. Instead, Holmes transported me back to a vibrant period of intellectual history when discoveries in the natural sciences seemed to minimize the centrality of humans in the cosmos and presented challenges to established religious tenets and authority. Make no mistake, though. Hallam, who died in 1833, In Memoriam (1850) and Tennyson’s grief over decades was the beating heart of this study, and I found it intensely interesting and satisfying.

A “boundless deep” can invite exploration and discovery but can also be scary and deeply upsetting. Holmes suggested that there was a depth to young Tennyson’s feelings for Hallam—wonderful new feelings which caused his spirit to soar but also a fear of the forbidden and the unknown. Cambridge University in the 1830s—a same-sex environment--would not have discouraged the formation of such an intense bond. Tennyson summoned massive courage just to invite the toff Hallam to undergo scrutiny by his boisterous, dysfunctional family. Then Tennyson was forced to withdraw from Cambridge (and Hallam) for financial reasons when his alcoholic father died in 1831.

It was a lure and a cover, perhaps, that Tennyson had marriageable sisters. When Hallam began courting Emily Tennyson in earnest in 1831, social convention then would have allowed Alfred and he to remain even more closely tied. Alfred and Arthur took “road trips” to Europe in the summers of 1830 and 1832. A souvenir from the first trip, a black Spanish cloak, became Tennyson’s sartorial signature for the rest of his life. How did Tennyson cope with a rival for Arthur’s attention within his own family? Did he acknowledge the disquieting jealousy (p. 78) that invariably rose from the depths of his feelings for Arthur? Details of that personal struggle as much as challenges to Christian belief are what made In Memoriam unpublishable for seventeen years. It also sidetracked for a decade Tennyson’s intention to wed Emily Sellwood. She probably needed certainty that a ghost would not be her rival for Alfred’s love in their marriage. It was poignant to me, and I shed a tear when I read (p. 288) that the newlyweds first stop on their honeymoon trip was a visit to Arthur’s grave.

Holmes’s scholarship of his subject is broad and deep and kind of intimidating, actually, until one considers that he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his many books on English literature. His facility in pulling up pertinent information and comparisons brought to my mind Google maps: you know, how one designated point on a map will automatically bring up a dozen interesting or helpful related points of interest. This meant that Holmes also knew all the anecdotes about Tennyson that—without warning—made me laugh out loud. Holmes further confirmed for me that in all those photos I remembered of Tennyson in midlife where he appeared as rumpled and disheveled as an unmade bed, he definitely would have reeked of tobacco and probably body odor as well.

Significantly, Holmes’s book concluded not in 1850 with the publication of In Memoriam or the mantle of laureateship that same year for Tennyson (at age 40), but with the 1859 publication of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation from Persian of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Fitzgerald had the same type of repressed, unnamed same-sex attraction over years for his slightly younger and fabulously handsome protégé Tennyson. For me this was further evidence of the unstated centrality of same-sex attraction in this book. Mimicking Tennyson’s marriage, Fitzgerald was driven in 1856 to try matrimony but failed at it disastrously after a few months. Fitzgerald was independently wealthy and not driven to publish like Tennyson, for whom it was income.

It was a treat to revisit and reappreciate poems that I had not read since my undergraduate courses in the 1970s. By the end of this book, I was reading verses aloud for sheer enjoyment of the meter and rhyme. I had long ago given up on ever enjoying again this type of connection to poetry. Thank you, Richard Holmes.

[Tamara Agha-Jaffar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes charts Tennyson’s early years until he became poet laureate. The biography captures Tennyson’s loneliness and feelings of isolation during his early years and the crisis of faith he experienced in his later years. Tennyson is described as a tall, handsome, imposing figure, unkempt, with a scruffy beard, enveloped in smelly tobacco smoke, and sporting his signature black Spanish coat and sombrero.

Holmes portrays the early Tennyson as a conflicted individual struggling to reconcile his faith with new scientific discoveries. His early adult years coincided with rigorous debates about the emerging theories of evolution and the discoveries in geology and astronomy. Tennyson read heavily the works of geologists and astronomers and was an avid astronomer, incorporating cosmic imagery in many of his poems. He questioned humanity’s role and importance in a universe that pre-dated the existence of human beings by millions of years. Holmes explores how Tennyson’s crisis of faith is reflected in his poetry. He explicates Tennyson’s poems, showing how the theories of evolution and scientific discoveries of the day influenced his thinking and his writing. His marriage and the birth of his two sons brought stability to his life.

The biography is well-researched and engaging. Holmes covers a wealth of information about Tennyson’s early years. He describes his friendships with leading political figures, authors, artists, and scientists of the day. He analyzes the diction, rhyme, and meter of some of Tennyson’s poems. He cites excerpts from what others have written about him, as well as the critical reception his poetry received. Extensive notes, bibliography, index, and color plates are included.

Holmes' masterful biography vividly breathes life into one of the giants of English literature. The young Tennyson emerges as a flesh and blood figure, reserved, solitary, prone to fits of melancholy, plagued with existential anxieties, and thoroughly brilliant. He had the capacity to channel these qualities into some of the most beautiful poetry in English literature.

My book reviews are also available at www.tamaraaghajaffar.com

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a young teen I discovered Tennyson’s poetry in anthologies and responded to his theme of nostalgia and grief for lost times and people. This book caught my attention for it’s study of how the rising scientific discoveries in natural history impacted his world and his poetry. This was a totally new Tennyson for me.

In the early 19th c, theories to explain new scientific discoveries upset the old paradigm based on the Bible. Lyell. Herschel. Babbage. Evolution, fossils of unknown life forms, glimpses of other solar systems through monstrous telescopes, theories of a changing Earth. Tennyson devoured all the cutting edge science books. Holmes details how Tennyson’s poetry is filled with images and references to natural history.

Tennyson also struggled with the tragic early death of his beloved friend from Trinity College, Arthur Hallam, working out his grief in the poem In Memoriam, which he worked on for seventeen years.

How can scientific theory and faith coexist?

I think back on my grandfather who was ordained and interested in historical geology. He corresponded with researchers and raised funds for their work. He presented his ideas on the next Ice Age on public broadcasting. A Sunday afternoon ride was a teaching moment on the geological history of the landscape while at dinner we heard the latest news on Project Moho or other research. His sermons referenced the geological processes! I never considered how science fit into his faith.

Back to this book. I found the intersection of science and poetry fascination reading. Holmes includes excerpts from the poems to illustrate their connection to the science he believes inspired Tennyson. Not being a deep student of the poet, I didn’t always get the connection, but I trust Holmes understands the poet’s words on a deeper level. But I immensely enjoyed this read.

Thanks to Pantheon for a free book.

[Nicole Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Pantheon for the review copy of "The Boundless Deep" by Richard Holmes. It is greatly appreciated!
I have read some of Tennyson's poetry--it's kind of a requirement if you major in English literature--but I had never read a biography of the poet. Richard Holmes' "The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief" is excellent. Holmes discusses Tennyson's early home life fraught with uncertainty under the shadow of an increasingly violent alcoholic father; Tennyson's school years where his creative genius struggled to shine from behind curtains of depression; his footloose, untethered early writing years that found Tennyson still struggling with depression and trying to find his footing as a poet; and finally his successful middle age as the Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Baron Tennyson of Freshwater, Isle of Wight.
Holmes' study of Tennyson and his work sent me searching for two of his pieces I have never read, "In Memoriam," written in the memory of Arthur Hallum, a dear friend, perhaps even soulmate of Tennyson (or twin spirit?) that dies too young; and "Maud: a Monodrama," hailed by some as a brilliant portrayal of a tortured mind and reviled by others as absolute trash.
Reading Tennyson in college I never considered the mind behind the poems. Richard Holmes presents a brilliant writer that had a deep fascination with astronomy and geology; one who sought to understand the foundations of faith while he struggled with his own. Holmes gives readers a living portrait of an artist that could never have believed that his work would continue to inspire people 124 years after his death.

[Ron Peters · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw a positive review of this book in Scientific American, and I picked my copy up as a freebie from audible.com. I downloaded it because of the subtitle’s reference to “Science and the Crisis of Belief”. The question is a good one: What happens to a person’s faith and sense of meaning when geology, astronomy, and biology start to change your picture of the universe?

Tennyson as such doesn’t interest me deeply. He received considerable acclaim in the Victorian era, but my impression was that he was regarded as a bit of a fuddy-duddy by the time he died. Idylls of the King is one of my least-favorite pieces of poetry, and things like The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Lady of Shalott thump along like nursery rhymes.

I generally like books that combine ideas + history + personality, rather than simply delivering information. So, my enjoyment of this book depended on the balance between the intellectual history (which grabs me) and a biography of Tennyson (which doesn’t).

So, now I know considerably more about the life of Tennyson than I cared to, and the intellectual history was all delivered by way of close readings of poetry I don’t especially like! 😊 I still enjoyed the parts that did deal with what it felt like when science began to pull the rug out from under the old Christian way of life.

I still have Holmes’ The Age of Wonder on my ‘To Read’ list, and I have higher hopes for enjoying that one. The Boundless Deep gave me just enough intellectual history to keep me listening, while making me spend rather more time with young Tennyson and his poems than I bargained for.

[Brett Keeler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this on a bit of a whim - I had a goal of reading more biographies this year, and Tennyson's intro and theme of this book seemed to line up with things I'm generally interested in. It probably rates a smidge under 4 stars for me, but I'm wondering if I just am deducting points because I don't find much of early Tennyson's life particularly interesting. Regardless it was a bit refreshing to dive into a book with very little context for the first time in a while.

The book shines when directly quoting and discussing poetry. I found myself wishing for more poetry quotations, especially as someone listening to the book without quick access to search up information.

Highlighting how new scientific discoveries shaped poems / quotations ("red in tooth and claw" as a standout) and his struggles with belief were the best parts of the book. I really enjoyed how this book discussed popular science and the movement of information to the general public - a topic I struggle to find covered elsewhere - and how Tennyson's struggle with belief informs his poetry. However, he writes a nearly religious intro to one of his poems, likely to get married, as just another notch in the list of things men do when pursuing a romantic interest.

He didn't really fit the tone for an imperialist poet, which is ironic at best anyway, so the book fell off a bit at the end for me. Nor was I super interested in Fitzgerald playing some sort of hard-to-get with him? Those were the weak points of the book for me.

[Gina Dalfonzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the subtitle slightly misleading; it sounds like it keeps the focus on science and religion throughout, but in fact it's more a biography that weaves that theme in along with various other themes. At times it read almost like a joint biography of Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald, for no reason I could see until we got to the end and Holmes was like "Surprise! FitzGerald became famous as the translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam!" and I went "Ohhhh, okay, so he's actually accomplished as well and not just a guy who moped around a lot because Tennyson kept ignoring him." (Probably most people who read this book knew that already, but I'm not that familiar with the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam beyond the well-known few lines about the moving finger and the loaf of bread and so on.)

Anyway. When he focuses on the topic, Holmes does have some interesting things to share about science and religion in Tennyson's life and thought, though he could have given us a bit more of a baseline by showing what his religious beliefs were at the start. He observes Tennyson's shifting and sometimes contradictory ideas throughout his work, and how they shaped his reputation, with insight but without getting overly judgmental. I didn't know much about Tennyson at the start, so I learned quite a lot. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

[Pittounikos Dmt Moesy · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the intro Richard Holmes wisely trashes those stuffy Victorians and stuffy Lord Tennyson with his big marble statue and big beared like a prophet from ages ago when backwards man swung from branches and worshipped fire. Why, Richard Holmes asks the reader, should we not walk past the statue, if we even notice it at all?

This schrewed advertising worked on me.


There was nothing deep nor boundless with this history of Victorian ideas.

This book bored me to tears. I knew nothing of Tennyson, but I've heard the name. In fact, there are Tennyson Streets in many towns. And the name is even programmed into the Google word suggestion thingy. This is how far my knowledge of the man stretched. Saying this, I have read about the romantics, especially Blake and Byron. I like the taste of Romanticism.

I have come across deep and mystic quotes where Tennyson talks about immortality, here and there.
And I gather he was a reader of Emanuel Swedenborg (as was Coleridge and Carlyle).
Though Swedenborg isn't mentioned or anything else mystical.


Anyway, this book appears on my Amazon suggestions and I took the plunge.

Overall I was bored to tears.

I found the man boring. I think the fault is with me.

I was swept away by the gushing blurbs. Maybe the author is very famous and wrote masterpieces in better times?

[Cynthia Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I am not a poetry fan. I read prose exclusively, so I was a little hesitant to read a book about a poet. No need to be concerned. This is a well written, interesting, informative biography of Tennyson's early life. There is extensive analysis of his poetry and it is easy to discern. The book has been described as a literary biography and that is apropos. The author does an admirable job examining the major events in Tennyson's life and how they are reflected in and influenced his poetry.

This work discusses Tennyson's tumultuous family life, mental illness that infiltrated his family, his relationship with Hallam and FitzGerald, and his association with the intellectuals of the day like Dickens, Darwin, Babbage, Sellwood, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Lyell. Tennyson's interest in astronomy, marine science and geology and their influence on his poetry is investigated. His struggle with traditional religious views, his understanding of the known world and his place in it and the struggle between religion and science are all examined.

A thoroughly enjoyable read.

[Philemon - · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite up to Holmes's magisterial two-volume bio of Coleridge. Tennyson as a subject perhaps lacks Coleridge's depth, mystery, and darker side. This volume takes you only to Tennyson's forties; Holmes has not committed to a second volume covering the last 40+ years in which he served as Poet Laureate. Much of Tennyson's youthful decades were aimless and disregulated; he was a wanderer, roisterer, boon companion of other young writers (most notably Edward FitzGerald of Rubaiyat fame), unable to earn money, marry or settle down, focused only on a writing career that took some time to get going.

But he kept at it. His poetry, lush, protean, brainy (he was particularly interested in science, the Darwinist controversy, and astronomy), imaginative in the Romantic tradition, with his Arthurian retelling and other inventions, and perhaps above all, musical. He has gone down in literary history as the English poet with one of the very best ears.

Holmes's narrative, filled with samples from the poems, has left me with a yen to revisit Tennyson's poetry. For a biographer to lead readers enthusiastically to study the subject's works seems a sound and satisfying achievement.

[Mihiret · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography aims to provide a context for reading Tennyson's early poems. It is intriguing reading, filling in as much as possible about Tennyson's early thought, relationships, family challenges, and especially his combined joy and horror at the increasing questions raised by Victorian science. There are so many possibilities for going off a cliff--the mental health struggles of his family, the tension between faith and doubt, the deep intensities (and griefs) of friendships and relationships. They all spin around the poems and Tennyson himself. I found it a satisfying read, but most satisfying if read in stages, looking at one chapter's networks and pausing and coming back to examine another layer.

Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.

[Pegeen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A literary biography of the young Tennyson. Interesting influences : His admiration of Edgar Alan Poe ;his interest in Humboldt and Herschel scientists of the natural world and astronomy ; his association with physicist Tindell. Evolution as a quandary for those believers in the Bible. Women scientists influenced his poetry too : Lovelace and Somerville.
Some Tennyson:
Nature red in tooth and claw …

There lives more faith in honest doubt
Believe me, than in half the creeds…

Blow bugle blow, set the wild echoes flying … as imitating the science of sound waves.

The story Religious belief eroded by science into agnostic morality out of which flowed the resolution of poetry. .

[Elizabeth Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tennyson is my favorite poet, but I’ve never read a full biography of him. This was very good, but it didn’t stick to a thesis like I thought it would. Holmes discussed poems and life events that didn’t seem to have anything to do with science or belief. He also ended with the death of Tennyson’s frenemy Edward Fitzgerald when I thought he was close enough to Tennyson’s death he should just have dropped the “young Tennyson” angle. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about Tennyson and his times. The audiobook narrator, Oliver Hembrough, also did an excellent job. I especially loved his readings of Tennyson’s poetry.

[Sarah]

One of the great pleasures of my teaching life has been twice teaching Victorian Literature to undergraduates. I've seen them hotly debate Rochester's culpability, care for Dorian Gray against their better judgment, and delight in the complexities of the Brownings. One small disappointment, though, has been that I've never seen anyone develop the enthusiasm for In Memoriam that I developed as a sensitive teen who wrestled with the draw of Christianity and the striking evidence for natural selection. All that is to say, I really want to read this book.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up Boundless Deep because I was waiting for some holds to come arrive and saw this was about Tennyson. I memorized “The Charge of the Light Brigade” years ago, and my memory of the poem nudged me toward this audiobook. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but I ended up enjoying it.

What surprised me most was how much I enjoyed learning about Tennyson beyond the famous poems. Holmes brings out the human side of him: the doubts, the inspirations, the friendships, the losses. It made the poetry feel richer and more alive.

[Sorrento · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Richard Holmes for enlightening me about the life of the young Tennyson. This is a very well researched book from which I learned a lot about the man and his personal relationships with friends, family and fellow authors and artists.
Reading Richard's magnificent biography of this great poet it was brought home to me how Tennyson's poetry was affected by the amazing discoveries that were being made by the Victorians in the fields of astronomy, geology and biology that would challenge the Christian view of the universe.

A wonderful engaging read.

[Carlton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew a few of Tennyson’s most famous poems, but my real draw to read this book was the author and the consideration of the ideas in the early nineteenth century.
I was not disappointed, as this is a masterful evocation of Tennyson and his English milieu from the 1820’s to 1850’s.
For me, it also touched upon many books read and exhibitions experienced over the past thirty odd years engaging with Victorian art, science and literature, which richly enhanced my enjoyment and understanding
An outstanding portrait of an artist, actively engaged with the issues of his time.