Tennyson's Faith: A Nobler Type

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s reputation has faded despite once being celebrated for sound, tone, and evocative imagery; modernists and changing tastes made him seem mannered and irrelevant. Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep repositions young Tennyson as a poet shaped by the collision of late Romantic sensibility and emergent Victorian science. Holmes, an accomplished literary biographer, reads poems such as “The Kraken” and the elegies collected in In Memoriam against contemporaneous scientific writing and figures - Whewell, Lyell, Robert Chambers and popularizers like Jane Marcet and Mary Somerville - arguing that new geology, evolutionary speculation, and an expanding cosmology produced both existential terror and imaginative stimulus in Tennyson’s work. Holmes treats Tennyson as unusually well informed about science and as a poet who translates scientific awe and dread into formal, musical lyric.

Holmes traces how personal biography - an embittered clergyman father, Cambridge friendship with Arthur Hallam and Hallam’s early death - fused with scientific anxieties to make In Memoriam a public meditation on grief, doubt, and the possibility of spiritual evolution. The poem’s movement from desolation to a tentative, mystical consolation (the idea of humanity emerging as a “nobler type”) is central to Holmes’s reading. Holmes closes his account at 1850, when Tennyson finally marries and becomes poet laureate, presenting that moment as the hinge from anguished youthful inquiry to the settled public figure whose later reception diverged from his earlier experimental intensity.