“The Boundless Deep”: Richard Holmes on the Young Tennyson

It’s not exactly a confession, but I have the textbook I used for English in my senior year of high school, England in Literature. It’s not the one I actually used, but a copy I found at a used book fair. And I’ve also held on to the texts from my two courses in English Literature in college – the Norton Anthology of English Literature, published in 1962 and revised in 1968. I’d prefer not to think about how many editions have occurred since then (those recent is 2024). 

I pulled both texts from the shelf recently to see what poems were included from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). I’ve been reading The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes. Holmes cites Tennyson poems I’d never heard of, and I wondered how many of them had been included in those textbooks.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Foxy noses – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“The Frog,” poem by Hillaire Belloc – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Close and Slow: ‘The Thought Fox’ by Ted Hughes – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Fifty – poem by David Whyte.

 

“To Rosamounde,” poem by Geoffrey Chaucer – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Richard Holmes’ “Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage”

Richard Savage (1697 or 1698 – 1743) was a English poet who claimed to be the illegitimate son of an earl and a titled lady. There’s some support for the claim, although nothing really definitive. He made his name through a series of poems, including one entitled “The Bastard” that was aimed at embarrassing and humiliating his mother (which it did) and gaining him some hush money in the form of a pension (which it also did). In 1727, Savage was arrested with several friends and tried for the murder of a man in a coffeehouse which doubled as a brothel. Savage was found guilty but a few weeks later was pardoned by the king. His notoriety gained him access to all kinds of circles, both literary and aristocratic.

A drawing of Richard Savage

He also had a most unlikely friendship with the young Samuel Johnson, he of the great dictionary, subject of one of the world’s most famous biographies, and the man who helped save the plays of William Shakespeare from oblivion.

Savage was one of the first people Johnson met when he arrived in London in 1737. They made an odd pair of friends, the older and rather refined-looking Savage and the younger and physically ungainly Johnson. For almost two years, they spent considerable time together, especially walking London’s residential squares late at night. During those walks, Savage would describe his life, his parentage, his poetry, his passions, and his prejudices. When Johnson published “London,” some believed (and some academics still do) that the main character in the narrative poem was a thinly disguised Savage. Johnson later denied it, but the question remains. Certainly Savage was an influence on the poem.

Samuel Johnson

Savage eventually fell on hard times, left London (aided by friends like Alexander Pope) for Wales, and died in 1743 in the Bristol jail, where he had been imprisoned for three years for non-payment of debts. Johnson was commissioned to write Savage’s biography.

As described by Richard Holmes in Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, what Johnson created with this work was more than a standard biography. An Account of the Life of Richard Savage (1744) changed the nature of biographical writing, almost creating a new genre, something between biography and fiction. Johnson didn’t always get his facts right, but he wrote beautifully and entertainingly. Holmes also makes a good case for Johnson writing much of himself into the story of Savage.

Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, was clearly uncomfortable with Johnson’s relationship with Savage and tended to downplay Savage’s influence. Savage was looked down upon for the rest of the 18th century. But his influence on Johnson was clearly there, whatever qualms Boswell might have had.

The biography established Johnson. A year after its publication, he was commissioned to produce the dictionary. His growing reputation attracted a wide circle of admirers, and Johnson soon found himself part of the literary and social establishment.

Richard Holmes

Holmes, retired professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., is the author of numerous works on the Romantic poets and their era, including Shelley: The Pursuit (2003); The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science (2010); Coleridge: Early Visions and Coleridge: Darker Reflections (2011 reissues of the earlier two-volume biography); The Romantic Poets and Their Circle (2014), a companion guide to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London; and two literary research memoirs, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1996) and Sidetracks (2011 reissue).

Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage is a fine account and informed reconstruction of the relationship between two men, one of whom slipped into obscurity but powerfully influenced the other and indirectly helped to establish his fame.

Related:

Lexicographer Samuel Johnson: Bookended by Poetry – at Tweetspeak Poetry. (This post is a revised version of the Tweetspeak Poetry article.)

Top illustration: An antique map of London in 1730.

“The Romantic Poets and Their Circle” by Richard Holmes

For most of us, when we read the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Coleridge (“the Big 5”), we read their poetry in the high school or college classroom. We might get a paragraph or two of introduction to the times in which they lived and wrote, but we don’t usually get much beyond that. Unless a gifted teacher, determined to help the class understand, goes into great detail about the Romantic era.

As Richard Holmes reminds us in The Romantic Poets and Their Circle, Romantic poetry didn’t spring from nothing; it had a context, a very broad context, involving the other creative arts, politics, culture, society, war and revolution. What was happening in poetry was important because it both influenced and reflected what was happening in society at large, especially British society.

Holmes, professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the British Academy, has a deep background in the Romantic period. His works include Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), Coleridge: Early Visions (1989), Footsteps (1996), Selected Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1996), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (1998), Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2001), and The Age of Wonder (2010). He’s also the author of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (2011) and Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (2014).

This particular work is a comparatively small volume of some 136 pages, written and assembled for Britain’s National Portrait Gallery in London. It features in introductory essay and some 30 short entries on the Romantic poets and the painters, editors, essayists, and writers who formed the literary culture of the period that covers approximately 1770 to 1830.

Richard Holmes

Consider what was happening during that period: the American and French revolutions; the rise and ultimate defeat of Napoleon; the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; the growing demands for universal male suffrage and the first stirrings of the idea that women might have rights, too; scientific breakthroughs; the War of 1812. And Holmes notes that something which arose then that we today find completely familiar was the Romantic notion of genius, or illumination from within, including a marked emphasis on individual feelings.

It was also an age of counterrevolution – Napoleon’s defeat and the restoration of the Bourbons, the Congress of Vienna that ushered in the “Age of Metternich,” the often brutal suppression of worker unrest in Britain. It is. Perhaps, another reason why the Romantic period seems so familiar to us today – it was an age of extremes in politics, society and even personal morality.

As short a volume as it is, The Romantic Poets and Their Circle is a succinct introduction to the people and the period whose influence continues today.

This month at Tweetspeak Poetry, I have a series on the poet John Keats and the Keats Walk I took while recently in London. Last week, I introduced the series with “Keats and a Walk into His Life.” Tomorrow, I look at the religion and politics that influenced his poetry.

Painting (top): Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps,” oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner (1812). Tate Britain Museum, London.