In 1816 the seven-year-old Alfred Tennyson wrote his name on the inside page of his schoolbook: “A. Tennyson, Somersby, in Lincoln, in England, in the World, in the Air, in Space.” It is the sort of thing that children have done for generations, a way of locating a tiny self at the center of a vast and wobbly universe. I did the same thing at that age, writing “K. Hughes, Staplefield, Sussex, England, Great Britain, the World, the Galaxy, the Universe” in my exercise books. This act of cosmic centering was prompted by seeing Neil Armstrong bounce across the moon’s surface in the summer of 1969. Urgent questions had immediately presented themselves: Where did I stand in relation to such bewildering immensity? And, equally perplexing, why was the moon in America?

Young Alfred Tennyson grew up in a similarly provincial bit of England, tucked away in his father’s vicarage on a remote part of the east coast of England in a village of fewer than a hundred souls. The little boy’s imaginative mapping of “World,…Air,…Space” owed much to his repeated reading of Jane Marcet’s influential Conversations in Chemistry (1805) and Conversations in Natural Philosophy (1819). These nursery best sellers were intended to give young readers a grounding in emerging strains of scientific thought. Chapters included “On Light and Heat,” “On the Chemical Agencies of Electricity,” and “On Wind and Sound.” Marcet’s intention was certainly not to disturb the religious faith of her young readers, most of whom would have been raised on a literal understanding of the biblical creation story. Tennyson, however, later reported that his early childhood reading had begun the process of chipping away at his faith: “The oxygen and carbon and all the rest of it unsettled me a little, and made me less able to believe.” You can’t help noticing that in his listing of “World,…Air,…Space,” this clergyman’s son has left out God completely.

These nursery primers turned out to be the start of Tennyson’s lifetime immersion in contemporary science. Telescopes and microscopes were everywhere by then, shrinking and stretching the Earth and sky and, in the process, expanding archaeological time from centuries to eons. The astronomer William Herschel argued that the universe was vaster and older than anyone had realized. The geologist Charles Lyell proposed that the very ground beneath mankind’s feet had been reshaped countless times before the beginning of human history and was even now in a state of flux. More disturbingly still, the Earth was pocked with the fossils of species that God had created only to render them extinct. And then in 1844 came Robert Chambers’s best-selling proto-Darwinist Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which sketched a plausible outline of biological evolution. It was becoming abundantly clear that the universe was not simply older and vaster than had been previously believed, but more perilous too. If the dinosaurs and woolly mammoths that once roamed the Earth had since crumbled into dust, then what hope was there for humanity?

In The Boundless Deep the veteran biographer Richard Holmes sets out to show how Tennyson’s thought and poetry were “animated by the new science and the new scepticism.” In some ways it is a sequel to The Age of Wonder (2008), his group biography charting the delight with which the earlier generation of Romantic poets responded to the discoveries of their scientific contemporaries, including Humphry Davy and Joseph Banks.^* Now Holmes moves his “two cultures” project—C.P. Snow’s term for the growing chasm between science and the humanities—on to the darker 1830s and 1840s to explore how science engendered not joy but rather a “crisis of belief” in Victorian England’s preeminent poet. This biography of “young Tennyson” culminates in his great poetic masterwork of 1850, In Memoriam, written when he was forty, which captures the state of “hovering, or trembling, between science and religion, between empirical evidence and traditional faith.”

The book begins, though, with an earlier poem, written when Tennyson was just twenty. “The Kraken” is a “stretched” fifteen-line sonnet describing a hideous creature that sleeps at the bottom of “the abysmal sea,” feeds occasionally on “huge sea-worms,” and bides its terrible time until the moment when “in roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.” With its mix of Norse mythology, eighteenth-century cryptozoology, nineteenth-century science fiction, and the biblical apocalypse, the poem tells of something tragic and mysterious lying just beyond the bounds of human knowing.

For Holmes the Kraken is multivalent. At one level it is the new science, that growing body of knowledge that threatens to rise to the surface and disrupt the comfort of a God-given universe and its promise of eternal life. Then again, perhaps the Kraken is, quite literally, a sea monster. In 1830, the year Tennyson wrote the poem, Charles Lyell began to publish his three-volume Principles of Geology, which replaced the biblical account of creation with a theory of uniformitarianism. Lyell posited that the Earth (and sea) was forever being made and unmade by observable processes including erosion, sedimentation, and volcanic activity. New rocks and lifeforms were created over billions of years, before equally slowly resolving back into dust. In one speculative passage, Lyell even imagines that Jurassic creatures might be biding their time in forgotten pockets of the Earth, awaiting the conditions that would spark them back into being (a nod, perhaps, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). A hitch in the global climate, say, might allow the huge iguana to “reappear in the woods, and the Ichthyosaur in the sea.” In which case might there not also be a drowsing marine monster, a Kraken, just waiting to break cover?

Then again, suggests Holmes, perhaps the creature represents Tennyson’s “Inner Kraken,” his proto-Freudian unconscious or even his soul. There was certainly no shortage of dark material to bury there. Tennyson’s difficult childhood has been retold many times: he grew up with ten siblings, a painstaking mother, and a devil of a father in an isolated rectory on a melancholy stretch of the North Sea. The Reverend George Tennyson was a polymath who tutored his biblically large tribe of children in Latin and Greek, poetry, philosophy, botany, and physics. By the time Alfred, the third born, was able to recite Horace’s Odes from memory, he also knew how to use a solar microscope to examine plants and insects from the garden. At night the precocious boy swept the skies with a telescope.

While young Tennyson’s imaginative universe stretched from the smallest, nearest forms to the vast and distant, it was the middle-sized creatures that caused all the trouble. Reverend Tennyson had a drinking problem that fueled a propensity for violence. He regularly got into vicious fights with his coachman, and once burned down the kitchen while the cook was inside. Nor was his own family off limits. On one occasion the rector chased his eldest child, Frederick, with a knife, threatening to kill the young man with a swipe to the jugular.

The brooding atmosphere at Somersby rectory recalls that of the Brontës’ Haworth parsonage, eighty miles due north, and headed by another weapon-wielding, Cambridge-educated clergyman. Like the Brontës, the Tennysons shunned outside company and clung together in what sounds like intense trauma bonding. The rectory itself was unkempt, and Holmes mines another early masterpiece, the long poem “Mariana” (1830), for its Gothic atmosphere: “The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse/Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d.” At least one son followed their father into alcoholism and several spent long stretches in mental asylums. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralyzing gloom and “weird seizures” during which he stared blankly into the distance for minutes at a time. “We Tennysons are a black-blooded race,” he declared years later with a certain grim satisfaction.

“The Kraken” and “Mariana” were written at Jurassic-stoned Cambridge, where Tennyson arrived in 1828. He had enrolled at Trinity, the university’s grandest and richest college, where his two elder brothers were also in residence. But it was Alfred who stood out, with his shock of wild dark hair and terrific bone structure. He looked, in short, exactly as a poet of the late Romantic age was supposed to (the bardic Victorian beard lay two decades in the future). By happy accident Tennyson’s tutor was William Whewell, the professor of mineralogy, whose wide-ranging scientific expertise was crucial in bridging the gap between empirical observation and philosophical theory. Tennyson was asked to join the Apostles, the elite Cambridge debating society, and in 1829 won the university’s poetry prize, the Chancellor’s Gold Medal. According to his new college friend, a handsome Etonian named Arthur Hallam, provincial Alfred was “promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century.”

Arthur Hallam was everything a clever young man might seek in a life partner. An excellent poet himself, yet without a jot of jealousy, Hallam was one of the few people allowed inside the rectory before Reverend Tennyson’s merciful extinction in 1831. During a Christmas stay in 1829 he had fallen in love with Alfred’s sister Emily, to whom he became engaged. If the marriage had gone ahead, it would have made the two young men, in the usage of the time, “brothers.” Whether they were also lovers is something that posterity has endlessly debated, but Holmes chooses not to press the point, taking refuge in the usual nostrum that the language of Victorian same-sex friendship is hard to decode from this distance. Still, there are phrases in his elegy, In Memoriam, that make you wonder—such as when Tennyson calls himself Hallam’s “widow.” Might such homoerotic feelings also lie buried in “the Inner Kraken”?

It was not until 1832 that the sea monster finally chose to rise from the deep and make itself known. That December Tennyson published his second collection of poems, which included “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Lotos- Eaters”; it was universally panned. The most vicious review came from J.W. Croker in the conservative Quarterly Review. Croker labeled the work “dreamy” and scathingly situated Tennyson as part of a “milky way” of weak poets. (He was thinking of Keats, to whose Endymion he had dished out similar harsh words in 1818.) Amid this drubbing it’s notable that even a middle-aged conservative like Croker was by now fluently deploying metaphors drawn from the observations of William and John Herschel, the astronomical father and son.

Even so, the Kraken had not done its worst. The following September Hallam died at the age of just twenty-two, having collapsed from a cerebral embolism while traveling in Europe with his father. This double wrecking of Tennyson’s personal and professional life stopped him from publishing poetry for nearly a decade. The marvelous young man who had given every impression of “promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century,” now retreated into what Holmes characterizes as his “vagrant years.” Vagrant not only in the sense of wandering between the new Tennyson family home in Surrey, friends’ London lodgings, and a beach hut on the wild coast of Lincolnshire, but also in the sense of leaving behind any fixed and settled way of life. A small stipend from his aunt, the rector’s rich sister, relieved him from the obligation to find work. Instead, Tennyson’s thirties were spent chain-smoking and reading deeply in a scientific literature that refused to offer hope that he would one day be reunited with Hallam:

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

In the seventeen years that it took to write In Memoriam, Tennyson moved “out of the claustrophobia of private grief,” Holmes writes, to grapple with “the far greater challenge posed by general extinction in nature.” Since Tennyson completely restructured the order of the poem’s 133 cantos just before publication, we cannot know the chronology of its composition. What is clear, though, is that his working methods were generally slow and iterative. Writing in a series of “butcher’s books”—long, thin accounting ledgers used by tradesmen—Tennyson consistently set aside scraps of verse before returning later to refine them. Viewed like this, In Memoriam starts to take on its own distinctive geological formation, built of strata laid down over time, in which fossils of earlier versions are embedded.

Holmes proves himself a wonderful archaeologist, delicately excavating In Memoriam’s complex structure, blowing the dust from its scientific language, and bringing its intellectual underpinnings to the surface. Although Lyell’s influence looms large, Tennyson’s tone isn’t consistently bleak. Indeed, in places he expresses something akin to the wonder of the earlier Romantic poets, as when contemplating Earth’s essential changefulness: “The hills are shadows, and they flow/From form to form, and nothing stands.” This tone of tranquil contemplation echoed conversations from his own life. One day on a walk with a friend he pointed to a hill and declared, “It’s four hundred millions of years old;–think of that!” Just for this moment he sounds as if he were seven again and immersed in Jane Marcet.

As the poem focuses in on the actual process of change, though, the mood turns darker. When the narrator of In Memoriam declares, “There where the long street roars, hath been/The stillness of the central sea,” the reader is slammed into awareness that one day the ocean may return to obliterate the busy human present. The threat becomes even more existential as the poet faces up to Lyell’s insistence that all “types,” or species, including the human race, are heading for extinction. In canto 56 not only is God nowhere to be found, but Nature presides over the subsequent carnage with indecent pleasure:

From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, “A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.”

You might think that a narrative of annihilation expressed in nearly three thousand lines of iambic tetrameter would not prove popular. Yet the fact that In Memoriam A.H.H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII sold out on publication suggests that it struck a deep and painful nerve. Thoughtful readers who had been wrestling with the implications of the new science saw their own anguish reflected in the poet’s cry, “I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,/And gather dust and chaff.” It was a spiritual rack on which many of the leading public intellectuals of the day—including George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and James Froude—had also writhed.

But Tennyson offered these tortured souls something more than fellow feeling. As they fell from faith he provided a place to land: if not exactly featherbed comfortable, it was intellectually secure and psychologically solid. In canto 96 he suggests that those who experience “honest doubt” about Christianity while continuing to honor its ethical teachings are far more moral than those who blindly gabble “the creeds” without sparing them a second thought:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

It wasn’t until 1869 that the term “agnosticism” was coined by T.H. Huxley, the secretary of the Royal Society who was sometimes known as Darwin’s Bulldog. “It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe,” Huxley later wrote. Agnosticism became, thanks largely to In Memoriam, the unofficial religion of the Victorian intelligentsia. Other poets and writers especially valued Tennyson for giving them a spiritual home. G.H. Lewes, himself a man of science, declared In Memoriam superior even to “Lycidas,” Milton’s great classic of mourning and spiritual consolation.

“Honest doubt” might have been a livable compromise for many mid-Victorians, but it was not enough for Emily Sellwood, the Lincolnshire solicitor’s daughter to whom Tennyson had been unofficially engaged for about a decade, until things were broken off at the end of 1839. This rupture had come about because Henry Sellwood did not think that a man with wild, foreign-looking hair who was dependent on a dole from his aunt was a suitable son-in-law. Devout Emily, meanwhile, felt that her fiancé’s agnosticism, even when dignified as “honest doubt,” would make marriage in good faith impossible.

Yet in 1850, just months before In Memoriam was published, both these objections were swept aside by a lengthy prologue that Tennyson tacked on to the front of his poem. In this extraordinary addendum the poet not only recants his previous religious doubts, but repents his great love for Hallam and his inconsolable sadness at his death. In short, this late-arriving apologia appears to undo at a stroke Tennyson’s years of agonized inquiry into religious faith in the scientific age.

In its final form In Memoriam opens with a direct and heartfelt appeal to God, in language that sounds as if it had been pulled straight from the Anglican hymnbook:

Strong Son of God, Immortal Love,
Whom we, who have not seen Thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove.

From here Tennyson plunges on to question the reliability or permanence of scientific knowledge:

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

The implication is that the “little systems” of science are as subject to extinction as any other phenomenon. They may flare up fashionably for a while before burning themselves out or at least becoming “broken lights”—faulty attempts to represent the divine. Finally, there is that moment of surrender—“We have but faith: we cannot know”—followed by the warning that only God can supply the permanent guiding light, that everlasting “beam in darkness.” The whole thing sounds, as Holmes writes, like a “great organ peal of faith.”

There is more, though. In the final stanzas of this perplexing prologue, Tennyson humbly begs forgiveness for the “confusions of a wasted youth.” These confusions include not only his recent years of religious skepticism, but (even more painfully) his passionate attachment to and mourning for Arthur Hallam:

Forgive my grief for one removed
Thy creature whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.

Whether Richard Holmes feels aggrieved with Tennyson for this last-minute capitulation to convention, he does not say. But just possibly, given that he is often styled a “Romantic biographer,” he may be consoled by Tennyson’s late turn toward a love that was present and real. For the prologue was enough to win over both cautious Emily Sellwood and her suspicious father. A few weeks after the publication of InMemoriam, Tennyson married his girl, and a few months later further appeased his father-in-law by being appointed poet laureate on the say-so of an admiring and equally science-minded Prince Albert. Despite bride and groom both already being forty or thereabouts, they enjoyed a further forty-two years together. Their elder son was christened Hallam.

In returning Tennyson to the intellectual and emotional ferment of his early years, Holmes intends to do more than merely tether his poetry firmly to its sources. Equally pressing is his desire to rescue Tennyson from the charge, which was being made even before his death in 1892, that there was something meretricious about his verse making. Crowd-pleasing phrases from In Memoriam soon began to break free from their moorings and circulate in the culture at large as a series of popular “sayings”: “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” “’Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all,” “Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.” Repeated too often, worn smooth with familiarity, these phrases ended up in the wrong hands—or mouths—sounding as banal as a fortune cookie.

For the modernists it was this capacity for jog-trot meter and sonorous phrase making that sealed Tennyson’s reputation as a windbag Victorian churning out vacuous, sententious verse by the yard. James Joyce dubbed England’s twelfth poet laureate “Alfred Lawn Tennyson,” as tame as a genteel racket sport. W.H. Auden was even harsher: “He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest.” Yeats, characteristically, reckoned that it was Tennyson’s “brooding over scientific opinion” that “extinguished” the true flame of poetry in him.

They were all wrong. Lawn tennis was not invented until Tennyson was sixty-five, and there is no evidence that he ever ventured out on the courts in crisp whites. (He was notoriously ragged, dressed always in sooty colors, and was, not to put too fine a point on it, distinctly pungent. This was no one’s idea of a gentleman sportsman.) Nor was he “stupid,” although it is always worth cherishing Auden’s backhanded compliment about “the finest ear.” And Yeats, as Holmes triumphantly proves in this generous book, was entirely mistaken in his belief that Tennyson’s preoccupation with science had ruined his poetry. Unlike the Romantics, Tennyson did not quarry scientific terms and deploy them merely because they made novel or striking metaphors. Rather, he metabolized the original documents of the great scientific age, wrestled with their implications, and then produced poetry to help with the soul-bruising dilemma of how to endure in a world from which God appeared to have fled.