Absorbing ... Holmes’s empathetic rendering of the sadness and isolation of the first half of Tennyson’s life makes it hard to begrudge him the cushioned respectability of the second. But it also invites us to appreciate the remarkable fruits of his protracted estrangement.
Holmes, the master scholar-biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, is ideally qualified for such a gig. 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.
There is no better literary biographer now writing than Richard Holmes ... There are dull stretches in Tennyson’s life, but there is hardly a dull paragraph in this richly detailed book.
The Boundless Deep, which starts out promising to focus on the poet in his youth, winds up being a standard one-foot-in-front-of-the-other biography, not quite cradle-to-grave but close ... Strange and disappointing, because Holmes is a gifted biographer, not to mention a fluent translator of science and an astute reader of poetry.
Enthralling ... Biography is serious, yes, and surely edifying, but who can call it lively, let alone fun? Holmes—our greatest living biographer, I’d argue, and certainly the finest, most vivid writer in the genre—is that rare author who can make it so.
Holmes, master biographer that he is, vividly conjures up this awkward, compelling figure. What gives his book its exceptional energy, though, is not what is happening on the surface of Tennyson’s life and Holmes’s narrative. It is the powerful undertow of threatened belief and existential anxiety tugging the reader down ... This biography is a compelling story of an odd, brilliant, charismatic character, and a reappraisal of a man who had become so very established we could no longer see him.
This shrewd, sensitive, beautifully written portrait provides a much-needed restoration of the human being beneath a barnacle-encrusted reputation. A must for poetry readers and a treat for anyone who enjoys fine literary biography.
