John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888, Oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London.

April 2026

Loved & lost

by Amit Majmudar

On The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, by Richard Holmes.

An education in discernment.

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What do we do with Alfred, Lord Tennyson? He came just a little too late for the Romantic rediscovery of emotional openness and natural description; by the time he started writing, these were poetic conventions, not Wordsworthian axes taken to Augustan ice. Impressively built, his six-foot, one-inch height placing him half a foot taller than the average Victorian man, he did not have the good sense to die tragically young. Instead he became the poet laureate; in Britain, that is a lifelong appointment, traditionally associated with a withering away of talent while in office. A gifted miniaturist, he insisted on making Sir Thomas Malory longer and duller. Chasing the examples of Shakespeare and Milton, he turned out hundreds of pages of blank verse—without understanding that the best English blank verse makes itself syntactically odd in some way, whether through late Shakespearean fragmentation or Miltonic Latinity. He ought to be forgotten by now.

And yet:

Now lies the earth all Danaë to the stars . . .

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white . . .

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean . . .