Richard Holmes talks to Suzi Feay

Biographer Richard Holmes brings new life to the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and uncovers a mercurial and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time.

Holmes describes a young poet born of a dysfunctional family but sustained by passionate friendships. He says he was a memorable poet but was also fascinated by the new astronomy, geology, biology and psychiatry. Holmes says his imagination and intellect were haunted by three fundamental scientific ideas, biological evolution, the idea of a godless universe and the possibility of planetary extinction. They inspired Tennyson to grapple with his own destiny, the threat of suicide and depression, and the struggle between love and loneliness, intellectual hope and spiritual despair.

Holmes has written biographies of Shelley and Coleridge and is a winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Here he talks to reviewer for the FT Suzi Feay.