The Boundless Deep

A Book of the Year in the Times; Telegraph; Spectator; Financial Times; Observer; Waterstones and Daunt Books
‘Replaces the dusty usual portraits of the poet laureate – as the gloomy Victorian author of the GCSE syllabus poem The Charge of the Light Brigade – with a sparkling vision of him as an intelligent and imaginative man who welcomed in the new scientific age. Truly enriching’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Holmes is probably our greatest chronicler of the Romantic poets … The Boundless Deep is a dazzling and tireless work of advocacy … Feather duster at the ready, Holmes swats the crepe and the cobwebs away to restore the living Tennyson as he was before he fossilised into a Victorian sage’
THE TIMES
‘Compelling … a fascinating insight into a great British poet whose depths, like those of the sea in his poem “Crossing the Bar” (1889), remain boundless themselves’
DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘A spryly written but deeply learned biography’
SPECTATOR
‘Biographer Richard Holmes specialises in seeing familiar figures from a new slant … Takes a dive into the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, rubbing away the stately, bearded behemoth beloved of Queen Victoria to reveal a more vibrant, youthful character’
FINANCIAL TIMES
‘There is an unusual, gentle mixture of imagination and empiricism in everything Holmes writes: a poetic sense of human psychology combined with a meticulous organised mind’
NEW STATESMEN
‘An extraordinary glimpse into the nature of poetic genius and the heart of the Victorian miracle – no-one can match Holmes’ range and sensitivity’
RORY STEWART
‘Richard Holmes, in this new biography, wants to create a fresh portrait of the young Tennyson, before the beard made him a Victorian. He has succeeded triumphantly in doing so…with enormous insight and subtlety’
DAILY MAIL
‘Shakes off the poet’s fusty image to reveal a young man grappling with the doubts of his age… Holmes presents Tennyson as more interesting, more clever, more elusive and downright peculiar than modern readers may imagine’
OBSERVER

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge.

In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as ‘surely the best biography of Shelley ever written’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers’ Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014.

He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

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