THE BOUNDLESS DEEP

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92) before he was “monumental and Victorian.”

Focusing on the poet’s “vagrant years,” 1829-1849, veteran biographer Holmes depicts an intense, charismatic, intellectually curious young man whose poetry was infused with the revolutionary scientific discoveries of the day. These discoveries both thrilled and alarmed him with their visions of “a godless universe and planetary extinction,” while Tennyson thrilled friends with his poetic gifts but alarmed them with bouts of depression and an inability to settle down. His father was an alcoholic, and his four brothers suffered from various forms of addiction and mental illness. The poet, in Holmes’ astute analysis, grappled with these issues as well, especially after the sudden death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, only 22 when felled by a stroke in 1833. The tortured fragments Tennyson began writing about this loss, masterfully combined with the existential questions prompted by his scientific readings, would eventually result in the work Holmes judges to be his masterpiece, a sequence of 131 poems called “In Memoriam.” This was finally published in 1850, the year Tennyson married at age 40 and was named poet laureate. Around this time, he also acquired the beard captured in the iconic Julia Margaret Cameron photograph that fixed his image as the quintessential stolid Victorian celebrity. On the contrary, Holmes demonstrates in his brilliant exegeses of such poems as “The Kraken,” “Maud,” “The Two Voices,” and the ongoing pieces that eventually coalesced into “In Memoriam,” Tennyson was Victorian in a much more interesting sense: the perennial struggle waged in his poetry and his soul between scientific skepticism and religious faith, the same battle that sparked the works of contemporaries such as George Eliot and Matthew Arnold. 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.