The Boundless Deep
Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief
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Beschreibung des Verlags
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR • 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.
"[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
"There is no better literary biographer now writing than Richard Holmes." —The Wall Street Journal
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this dynamic biography, historian Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder, uses the ideas of poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) as a window onto the "intellectual and spiritual schizophrenia" that permeated the Victorian era. Holmes zeroes in on Tennyson's early career, when his "thought and poetry were fired... by the new science and the new skepticism" and he grappled with "the struggle... between intellectual hope and spiritual despair." Throughout, Holmes returns to an early poem, "The Kraken (1830)," in which Tennyson writes of a "deep division" threatening to overtake the world as scientific revelations seemed to paint two vastly different pictures: while astronomy gave an "optimistic" view of an ever-expanding universe full of new worlds, geology offered a "claustrophobic" glimpse of a "cruel, meaningless" world full of "monsters, dust, and extinctions." Holmes depicts Tennyson, haunted by failed love affairs and the death of his friend, the poet Arthur Hallam, as drawn to an early kind of speculative science fiction, or "speculative natural history," that "put forth a radical vision of humanity... evolving, both physically and morally, to rise to a new peak." Tennyson himself, sounding surprisingly modern, once wrote that "it is inconceivable that the whole Universe was merely created for us who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun." It's a fascinating and delightfully questing deep dive into the turbulent spirituality of the modern age.
