On September 15, 1830, passing through Liverpool after a journey by sea from Spain, the poet Alfred Tennyson and his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam, both of them Cambridge undergraduates, attended the opening of the first steam railway line in Britain. It marked an epoch for a nation that dominated the world, largely through its scientific knowledge and its mastery of advanced technology. But a bizarre accident happened. The Tory minister William Huskisson, due to conduct the ceremony, was clutching the door of a train when it swung open and swept him under the iron wheels of the oncoming locomotive. He bled to death over the course of the afternoon.

Tennyson’s contemporaries understood that progress—scientific, technological, material—had its dangers and its trade-offs. What was more troubling to Tennyson was the rising tide of senselessness that progress brought. What was the meaning of all of this? How could a catastrophe that was the result of so much human ingenuity be described as part of “God’s plan”? How might a poet describe such a conflict in a poem? Tennyson’s faith in God had always had in it more ardor than rigor. In his youth it was assailed on two fronts. For one, he was the son of a violent and arbitrary alcoholic who happened also to be an Anglican clergyman. For another, he was drawn to—and intellectually quite capable of keeping pace with—the striding advances of geology, astronomy, and zoology. Each new publishing season seemed to bring a fresh scientific refutation of how the Bible said the world was made. As a boy, Tennyson was given a book by Jane Marcet, an author of popular books on scientific and economic subjects. “Somehow, I don’t know why, I felt differently after reading it,” he recalled. “The oxygen and carbon and all the rest of it unsettled me a little, and made me feel less able to believe, made my faith heavier, duller.”

Three years to the day after that railroad accident, Tennyson’s incertitude about such matters would take on a desperate seriousness. His beloved friend Hallam, by then twenty-two years old and engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily, would die of a stroke in Vienna, a shattering blow that brought a confusion of impulses: bereavement, fear, anxiety over Hallam’s immortal soul, a wish to reach some settled view of how the universe was ordered. Separate from his other work, he began scribbling down verses about Hallam’s death on big “butcher’s books”: reminiscences of Hallam, exegeses of biblical passages (including John’s account of Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead), questions about the direction of modern poetry, and, above all, speculation about whether the material world’s seeming indifference to man, as modern science understands it, tells us anything about the likelihood that we are the creation of a loving God. Tennyson kept at it for seventeen years. When, in 1850, at the age of forty, he finally assembled these fragments into a book-length autobiography of mourning, the result floored the poetry-reading public. In Memoriam is probably the greatest poem written in English in the nineteenth century.

T. S. Eliot, while noting that the poem had brought its readers “a message of hope and reassurance to their rather fading Christian faith,” also saw it not as an apologia but as an account of a dark night of the soul. “In Memoriam can, I think, justly be called a religious poem,” Eliot wrote of Tennyson, “but for another reason than that which made it seem religious to his contemporaries. It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience.” Tennyson makes the case against his own intuitive understanding of the world with a pitiless perseverance—with the anger, despair, and resentment of the mourner—and addresses science’s seeming claim that man is destined not for everlasting life but for simple annihilation:

. . . And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?

Tennyson’s quest to reconcile faith and science, to put the matter crudely, today looks like the heart of his achievement. That would have struck earlier readers as odd. In his youth, Tennyson wrote vivid and languorous love lyrics that arguably inspired the whole erotic conception of the pre-Raphaelite painters. He became a friend to Queen Victoria and a poet laureate of a patriotic kind—his “Charge of the Light Brigade” was learned by heart and declaimed by several generations of Englishmen. And his Idylls of the King, written over decades, popularized almost single-handedly the hitherto-forgotten legends of King Arthur.

Now Richard Holmes, author of an acclaimed two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, has taken the eschatological corner of Tennyson’s work and placed it at the burning center of a biographical essay that carries Tennyson through his forty-second year. In this it accomplishes little more than courses on Tennyson have been doing for decades: situating the reader in his time, passing judgement on his best poetry, and detailing the social and technological upheavals that shaped it. But perhaps this new treatment will have something to teach our own generation, which is enduring such upheavals of its own.

Tennyson was born in a book-filled rectory in rural Lincolnshire, one of eleven children. His father George, eldest son of a very wealthy family, had been disinherited and found himself launched on a clerical career. George Tennyson was a formidable scholar and, Holmes tells us, a formidable drunk. By middle age he was violent and sadistic. The relationship between his conduct and the alienation of his patrimony is unclear. We know that one of the family cooks burned to death in the kitchen, an incident that was “never fully explained.” Several of Alfred’s brothers fell into either opium or alcohol addiction themselves; all of his siblings, without exception, wrote. Two of his older brothers had also been promising poets.

Cambridge was a reprieve. When Tennyson arrived at Trinity College in 1827, he found not only his brothers but Edward FitzGerald, future author of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Thackeray would arrive two years later, in 1829. But the most dashing, popular, and, by some accounts, brilliant undergraduate in those days was Arthur Henry Hallam, son of a distinguished constitutional historian. Tennyson became Hallam’s closest friend at Cambridge, just as the future prime minister William Ewart Gladstone had been Hallam’s closest friend at Eton.

Tennyson was already something of a lyrical prodigy, capable since childhood of writing poetry in an astonishing variety of registers and able to entrance his fellow undergraduates with dramatic recitations. Hallam wrote Gladstone that Tennyson was “promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century” and took the responsibility upon himself of connecting Tennyson with publishers. A “furious Shelleyist,” Hallam was more radical in religion, politics, and poetry. It was he who swept Tennyson up in the English intellectual enthusiasm for Spanish liberalism and instigated their visit to Spain in 1830. (Many young English idealists went further, plotting an armed uprising—dozens would be executed by firing squad on the beach at Málaga the following year.) It was to this trip that Tennyson owed the black cloak, broad-brimmed Spanish hat, and walking stick that would become his outfit for the rest of his life.

Together with Hallam, Tennyson joined the recently founded Cambridge Apostles, a secret debating society of twelve undergraduates that in later years would include Bertrand Russell, Keynes, E. M. Forster, and a handful of Cold War–era communist spies.

Holmes makes much of Hallam’s “blond good looks” and describes him frequently as a “golden boy.” He is attentive to his subjects’ appearance, including the “tall, noble, golden” figure of Tennyson. Inevitably in our time, speculation has arisen about whether there was more to their intimacy than mere friendship. In this century, Robert Ross’s Norton Critical Edition of In Memoriam, for three decades a staple for undergraduates studying Tennyson, has been unstitched to accommodate a new essay from a “queer” perspective. The quest to discover something more about the friendship probably dates to the catty innuendo of Harold Nicolson’s biography of Tennyson, published in 1923, which reads like almost a fifth chapter of Lytton Strachey’s influential—in fact, outright contagious—Eminent Victorians of 1918. Nicolson called Tennyson “a Virgin’s spirit in a Titan’s form” and mocked his feelings for Hallam as “tremulous.” Did not Tennyson liken his sorrow over Hallam to that of a “widow”? Tennyson’s greatest biographer, Robert Bernard Martin, notes the ample evidence to the contrary—from Hallam’s engagement to Tennyson’s younger sister to Tennyson’s confession to a friend that he’d had no sexual experience of any kind until marriage—to reject such constructions, pointing out that we actually know more about Tennyson’s sexual life than we do about that of most of his Victorian contemporaries. Holmes nods at the various speculations without indulging them.

One reason such speculations survive is clear: we know less about Tennyson’s epistolary life than we ought to. He didn’t, by his own account, enjoy writing letters, and much correspondence has been destroyed, notably that with Hallam (by Hallam’s father Henry) and that with his wife-to-be Emily (by Tennyson’s son Hallam and Emily herself). Certain important and intimate parts of his personal life are thus poorly documented. In theory, Tennyson’s life ought to be a thrilling account of an anguished and eccentric man traveling, carousing, and conversing with the most gifted men of his age. He was a chain-smoker, a heavy drinker, a solitary walker. But beyond those superficialities, the details of his life seem to fall away from him like a chrysalis, leaving very little besides his poems.

In a way, that is too bad. Tennyson’s poems are so extraordinary that they leave one quite curious about how they were composed. Not all of the short ones make sense, and not all of the long ones hang together, but even Tennyson’s detractors will admit he has a strong case to be called the most euphonious of the English poets, with only Keats, perhaps, as a close rival. Indeed, the Romantic critic Leigh Hunt described him as “a kind of philosophical Keats.” You can get a sense of this euphony from the six-line poem “The Eagle,” which Tennyson wrote into the guestbook on a visit to William Wordsworth’s widow in 1850:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands,
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkl’d sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his garden walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Though he probably would not have done so at the start of his career, Holmes now despairs of conveying where this euphony comes from. “The familiarity with strict metrical forms, and their huge range of possible stanzaic structures,” he writes, “is one that has almost been lost to twenty-first-century readers.”

The Boundless Deep is a story less of Tennyson than of his era. Holmes is interested more in ideas than in people, and Tennyson is not always the person who interests him most. Holmes constantly turns his narrative towards Edward FitzGerald, perhaps Tennyson’s most ardent admirer at Cambridge, though this admiration was tinged with jealousy. FitzGerald shared a considerable part of his independent income with Tennyson, providing the poet with the means to practice his craft. “I am an idle fellow, of a very ladylike turn of sentiment,” the young FitzGerald wrote, “and my friendships are more like loves, I think.” That was the problem. When Tennyson left FitzGerald’s letters unanswered, FitzGerald gossiped bitterly about him and ran down his poetry to their mutual friends. He faulted In Memoriam for its “monotonous melancholy” but then wrote his own Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in a very similar meter. Increasingly, as they aged, Tennyson froze him out.

Tennyson was also aided by the polymorphous polymath Richard Monckton-Milnes, later Lord Houghton. Monckton-Milnes not only wrote the first biography of Keats but also served as a powerful member of Parliament. His hobbies ranged from telepathy to abolitionism to feminism to what we would today call bondage and discipline, a subject on which he wrote a long epic poem, eventually bequeathing one of the world’s most extensive pornography archives to the British Museum. He was close enough to Queen Victoria’s advisors to secure for Tennyson a civil pension of two hundred pounds a year.

The poet was gruff, grumpy, sometimes shy. “Tennyson,” the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti lamented, “was not Tennysonian.” But he had a strange magnetism. The Poetry Foundation’s online biography of Tennyson has a touching account of his relationship with Queen Victoria: “She had an untutored and naive love of poetry, and he felt deep veneration for the throne; above all, each was a simple and unassuming person beneath a carapace of apparent arrogance, and each recognized the true simplicity of the other.” Young poets flocked to him—Coventry Patmore, Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning), the anthologist Francis Turner Palgrave (whose Golden Treasury, the greatest of nineteenth-century poetry anthologies, used Tennyson’s work as the model for what great poetry was to begin with). “People fete and dine me every day,” he wrote in a blue moment. “Tennyson’s clothes and appearance turned steadily more and more tramp-like, dirty and tobacco-stinking,” Holmes says of his directionless life as a thirty-something bachelor, but there was always an integrity to him. Thomas Carlyle admired his willingness to “live unpromoted and write poems,” though he raged at him for his tenacious belief in what Carlyle called “the hereafter.”

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A proper sense of the mid-nineteenth-century conflicts that once made In Memoriam seem not just beautiful but urgent is difficult now to recover. We are tempted to associate them with Charles Darwin, Tennyson’s exact contemporary, who was studying classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge, when Tennyson was at Trinity. But Darwin’s Origin of Species was not published until 1859, almost a decade after In Memoriam. It would be more accurate to say that Tennyson was shaped with Darwin than by him. They grew up in a world of scientific tumult. In 1824 the Oxford geologist and theologian William Buckland discovered and reconstructed a dinosaur skeleton in Yorkshire. In 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously by an author later revealed as the encyclopedist Robert Chambers. The Vestiges, which Holmes informs us outsold Darwin for a generation, followed up on the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, also published anonymously in 1837, by Charles Babbage, who in addition to proposing a mechanistic view of the universe was also the inventor of calculating machines that are sometimes thought of as the forerunners to our own computers. Earlier still, in three successive volumes published between 1830 and 1833, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology had made an impression on both Darwin and Tennyson. Lyell showed that many kinds of animals had gone extinct in a period that to nineteenth-century ears sounded unbelievably remote. From there he began to speculate on the mind-boggling oldness of the Earth. This was a common experience in the nineteenth century; for many people it was devastating; whole passages of The Education of Henry Adams are devoted to Lyell. For Tennyson it was more devastating still because he encountered it at almost exactly the moment he lost his friend Hallam.

T. H. Huxley called Tennyson “the only modern poet, in fact the only poet since Lucretius, who has taken the trouble to understand the work and tendency of the men of science.” And in this tendency was the heart of Tennyson’s doubt. Extinction seemed to be an irrefutable natural principle, and it was the opposite of what he expected from God:

Are God and nature then at strife,
That nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life.

Two centuries later, while it seems quite possible that scientific evidence of the universe’s oldness or vastness might shake a person’s belief in God, it does not seem obvious that it would. In the eighth Psalm (Domine, Dominus noster), the vastness of the universe is grounds for questioning God’s view of man, not man’s view of God. That God and nature are at strife may be viscerally alarming to Tennyson. But the two are not synonyms, and the proposition cannot have been doctrinally alarming.

Tennyson would have ample opportunity to explain what he did not mean to say in In Memoriam. A lot happened to him in 1850. He married the very pious Emily Sellwood after an on-again, off-again engagement that had lasted more than a decade. He published In Memoriam. And partly because the royal consort Prince Albert was so moved by the poem, Tennyson was asked to become poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth. At the top of his doubt-filled poem, there now stood a prologue addressed to Jesus, asking Him to

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth.

Holmes does not know quite what to make of it. On one hand it “appeared to be a recantation of all his previous agnosticism,” on the other “an attempt to prepare—or at least forearm—his readers for everything that followed.” But he rightly does not question Tennyson’s sincerity in either direction. A poem is not a court deposition, especially a long poem that traverses what we might now call the “stages of grief.” Looking back, Tennyson’s narrator writes of one who might be Hallam but might just as easily be Tennyson himself:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather’d strength,
He would not make his judgment blind
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own.

Tennyson was for his generation the consummate poet: sensitive, musical, vivid, blind to nothing, and capable of drawing into his work the energy of the novel and the glamor of the machine age. He has not been to every generation’s taste. The early twentieth-century modernists, except for Eliot, despised him. University departments in the middle of the twentieth century restored him to his stature as one of English poetry’s half-dozen giant figures. He fell out of fashion with the end of the Cold War and the politicization of university humanities departments. In our own age, Tennyson’s reputation is improving. Such matters depend on whether societies tolerant of doubt can be equally tolerant of its resolution.