Dan Fletcher

To the reader who inherited the bearded laureate—and wants the young man who also knew how to wrestle with deep time, survive a crisis of belief, and give a generation its voice — this is for you. The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes Critically acclaimed author of *The Age of Wonder*. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. A New York Times Best Book of the Year So Far. “[Holmes is a] master scholar-biographer. . . . In prose so lucid that you barely notice when it has slipped into a stream of profound interiority, into the hidden life-current of his subject, Holmes gives us what feels like the whole man.” —The Atlantic “There is no better literary biographer now writing than Richard Holmes.” —The Wall Street Journal Holmes’s Tennyson is not only the author of *In Memoriam* and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He is the magnetic, mercurial young poet: a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time. Philosophers think; scientists measure. Tennyson’s gift was that he could do both in verse. That, for Holmes, is how a poet becomes the voice of an age of wonder and terror. The book gives the personal Tennyson—dysfunctional Lincolnshire family, drunken father, vivid friendships, unhappy loves, the death of Arthur Hallam—and the public one: the revolutionary discoveries in biology, astronomy, geology, and marine science that forced a generation to confront evolution, a godless universe, planetary extinction, and the tension between religion and science. Drawn from the poet’s early years and the intellectual currents that shaped him. Buy links - Amazon (hardcover): amazon.com/Boundless-Deep-Te… - Amazon (Kindle ebook): amazon.com/Boundless-Deep-Te… - Publisher page: penguinrandomhouse.com/books… About the author Richard Holmes is the prize-winning biographer of Shelley, Coleridge, and the author of *The Age of Wonder*, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the New York Times Best Books of the Year. His other works include *This Long Pursuit*, *Footsteps*, and *Sidetracks*. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy.