Tennyson Saw Evolution Coming—and It Nearly Broke Him
Tennyson's Faith: A Nobler Type
Alfred, Lord Tennyson has faded from modern bookstores and syllabi, dismissed by modernists as a stuffy laureate. Richard Holmes's new biography, The Boundless Deep, recovers the young poet who devoured the geology and astronomy of his day—Lyell, Chambers, Herschel—and turned the terror of evolution and extinction into In Memoriam. The book argues Tennyson stood at the meeting point of Romantic poetry and Victorian science, voicing a generation's doubt.
Nature, in light of Victorian science, could shout "A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go."