The Boundless Deep
Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief
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- 27,99 €
Publisher Description
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER 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.
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.
