The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief

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. (Feb.)