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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief

Hardcover

Sports GeneralGeneral World HistoryBritish History

Publisher Price: $35.00

ISBN10: 0307379671
ISBN13: 9780307379672
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: Feb 10 2026
Pages: 448
Weight: 1.55
Height: 1.80 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR - SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes, critically acclaimed author of The Age of Wonder, discovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time.

[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

Tennyson rose to eminence as rapid and revolutionary discoveries were being made in the fields of biology, astronomy, geology, and marine science. It was a period of immense change akin to our own. For the first time, people were pursuing answers to questions that had felt previously unknowable--about biological evolution, the notion of a godless, unpitying universe, and of planetary extinction. These were as terrifying to Tennyson as climate catastrophe is to us today. It forced many to grapple with their understanding of the known world and their place within it and fostered a growing tension between religion and science.

Tennyson's work during these years is suffused with strangely modern magic, and in Holmes' extraordinary biography, we witness Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering ideas about geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty, and terror of the new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution. Tennyson's wild imagination and deep engagement with these concepts helped him emerge as the poetic voice of his generation--and he remains an inspiration for our own age.

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