In this new biography, Richard Holmes discovers in Young Tennyson a magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time.
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.
