Thoughts of Time and Grief

Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief (Collins) £25

Sometimes it is hard to imagine a less canonical, more unfashionable poet than Tennyson. As Richard Holmes asks in the opening sentence of this wonderful biography, ‘Was Tennyson ever young?’ The image we have of him is a mature, somewhat introverted and dyspeptically bookish man, his handsome but stern features warning us to read, admire and learn. Tennyson is the voice of the establishment and, worse still, the empire, representing all that most modern English readers find most objectionable in the past. His technical accomplishments may have made him poet laureate, but that is because he is worthy and tedious.

Richard Holmes makes a powerful case that we have Tennyson right, but we are looking in the wrong place. His later poetry was often facile imperial propaganda, although more needs to be written about ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, which is skilful and more confrontational than most think, or outdated and anachronistic chivalric piety, like The Idylls of the King. We need to get back to the young Tennyson, a gloomy, tormented poet with an unsurpassable command of poetic craft. This Tennyson was a deep – but not always profound – thinker, obsessed with geology and science, ‘by the vastness, beauty and terror of the new cosmology’, and the wild sea in stormy weather. Solitary, eager to plough his own furrow, Tennyson, while convinced of his talent, was even more certain that he was doomed to fail. He was haunted ...