BOUNDLESS DEEP HB Tennyson Science & Crisis

A dazzling new biography of young Tennyson by the prizewinning, bestselling author of The Age of Wonder. Alfred Lord Tennyson is now remembered if he is remembered at all as the gloomily bearded Poet Laureate, author of such clanking Victorian works as The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the mournful author of the lugubrious elegy In Memoriam. In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes reawakens this somnolent Victorian figure, brings him back to sparkling life, and unexpectedly transforms him. From the prizewinning and bestselling biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, and author of the landmark, critically acclaimed THE AGE OF WONDER, Holmes recovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man but now haunted by the great intellectual and above all the great scientific issues of his time. The brilliant child of an obscure dysfunctional Lincolnshire family, terrorised by a drunken father, torn by unhappy love affairs but sustained by vivid friendships (especially that of Edward FitzGerald, the author of Omar Khayyam) Young Tennyson emerges in his first forty years as a memorable poet, hypnotically musical (The Lady of Shalott) yet intensely engaged with the new astronomy, geology, biology and even the psychiatry of the age before Darwin. Tennysons imagination and intellect were haunted by the eruption of three new fundamentally transformative scientific ideas biological evolution, the notion of a... | Richard Holmes BOUNDLESS DEEP HB : Young Tennyson, Science & the Crisis of