Even Alfred, Lord Tennyson was young once. You wouldn’t know it from the photos, thanks to which he is “enshrined in the national memory” as a “Victorian bard,” face swallowed by “a tremendous beard,” ever after “doomed to look ancient, patriarchal, and prophetic.” Richard Holmes’s purpose in his new study of Tennyson’s formative years, therefore, is to rediscover Tennyson before the beard. 

Inside Scoop: New Middle East, tale of two blue cities, a Rubio run?

Before, that is, he became: Lord Tennyson; Poet Laureate; the voice of his age; the intimate and confidant of Queen Victoria; so famous he could not attend a funeral without attracting a crowd; crowds which flocked to his house and stared through his windows as his family sat down to dinner, gawking made all the more alarming by the fact that he lived on the Isle of Wight. Which is to say that Holmes’s subject is Tennyson before he was Tennyson. 

To find him, Holmes deploys the lens of science, examining Tennyson’s abiding connection to the natural world and how the radical transformations wrought upon man’s understanding of it in the first half of the 19th century influenced and were manifest in his poetry. The result is The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, an informative and engaging book, though also a somewhat dissatisfying one.

Tennyson’s passion for science is evident from even a cursory perusal of his oeuvre. 

From “The Palace of Art,” first published in 1832, to 1842’s “The Two Voices” and “Locksley Hall,” through “Vastness” four decades later, to cite but four examples, scientific allusions are strewn across his poems like the fossils he and his contemporaries were equally fascinated and disturbed by. 

These were not throwaway references. Tennyson’s interest in science wasn’t superficial. He was steeped in it, so much so, contends Holmes, that it shaped the outlook expressed in his poesy. Not any abstract notion of science, but specifically that of the 1820s-40s.........

© Washington Examiner