The Boundless Deep - by Richard Holmes (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

A New York Times Best Book of the Year So Far
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

"[Holmes is] a master of his craft."
--The New Yorker

"[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

"There is no better literary biographer now writing than Richard Holmes. A formidable scholar with a genial talent for storytelling, he amplifies his archival research with personal investigation of the places and surviving objects from his subject's life. . . . [Holmes'] prose has the immediacy of a novel without the diminution of intellectual content. There are dull stretches in Tennyson's life, but there is hardly a dull paragraph in this richly detailed book."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Holmes proves himself a wonderful archaeologist. . . . As Holmes triumphantly proves in this generous book. . . . Tennyson did not quarry scientific terms and deploy them merely because they made novel or striking metaphors. Rather, he metabolized the original documents of the great scientific age, wrestled with their implications, and then produced poetry to help with the soul-bruising dilemma of how to endure in a world from which God appeared to have fled."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Enthralling. . . . Biography is serious, yes, and surely edifying, but who can call it lively, let alone fun? Holmes--our greatest living biographer, I'd argue, and certainly the finest, most vivid writer in the genre--is that rare author who can make it so. . . . The Boundless Deep makes Tennyson's youth a palpable presence, a time full of golden promise and undergraduate enthusiasm. . . . Readers usually encounter the poet as already bereaved, a shaggy sage ushered into literature courses with a cloud hovering over his head. . . . Holmes has resurrected that young 'old' Tennyson and made him unforgettable."
--Laura Miller, Slate

"Fascinating. . . . The Boundless Deep is a terrific book. It reads like a novel and was hard to put down. Full of sweeping historical context, it offers deep investigations into the life of an important literary figure who might otherwise remain as motionless and cold as that Trinity College statue. At the same time, Holmes' work introduces us to a talented young man who, in the end, was really not so different from the rest of us."
--Washington Independent Review of Books

"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

"Holmes's work is endlessly readable. . . . [He] is an excellent and engaging guide through Tennyson's family history of insanity, his friendships, his creative self-doubt--and above all, his poetry. . . . Holmes's oeuvre has only gotten better with age. These works of his seventh decade have shown him advancing his art as a biographer and historian, illuminating, through portraits like this one, the West's large-scale cultural, scientific, and technological changes. This latest book speaks to his energetic spirit, a researcher's imperative best described by one of young Tennyson's most famous lines: 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.'"
--New Criterion

"Holmes [is] one of the most accomplished literary biographers of our age. . . . the sort of writer to remind us of humanity's intellectual failures as well as its enlargements. . . . [In The Boundless Deep] Holmes proves his own mastery of form, allowing resonances to be heard and felt in his subjects' lives. It's part of what makes him such a great biographer--not only his active methods of research and his enthusiasms, but also his not uncritical sympathy, his sense of connection and shape."
--The Hudson Review

"Brilliant. . . . A fascinating story . . . Holmes tells it with his customary vividness and sympathy. . . . The Boundless Deep is one more vivid volume in the magisterial body of Richard Holmes's biographical work."
--Commonweal Magazine

"Superb. . . . Using Alfred Tennyson as his fulcrum Holmes unpacks the many intellectual currents that began to completely unhinge Victorian optimism and the Whig interpretation of history as one of linear progress. . . . Holmes emphasizes the networks of correspondence, research societies, and public lectures that helped spread these ideas beyond specialist circles. . . . [and] excels in these sections which collide many of his interests. . . . Everything we would expect from one of our greatest critics of the English Romantics."
--Literary Hub

"Informative and engaging. . . . Whether you've never read Tennyson before or Holmes's book encourages you to revisit him, it will have you reaching for his poetry."
--Washington Examiner

"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

"A delightfully questing deep dive into the turbulent spirituality of the modern age."
--Publishers Weekly, 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

About the Author

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.