Richard Holmes in conversation with The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize
How does it feel to be shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize?
Exciting, not to say bubbly! And a real honour to be listed once again for this old and stylish literary prize, with its early French connections and its continuing champagne atmosphere.
What drew you to the subject of The Boundless Deep?
After finishing my Lives of Shelley and Coleridge, I always wondered what happened next in the great tradition of English poetry. Then I discovered that a fourteen year old boy, living in a remote village in Lincolnshire in 1824, had carved “Byron is dead” on a sandstone rock above the village stream. His name was Alfred Tennyson. I had found my next subject
How did you plan, research and write The Boundless Deep?
I began to research a big panoramic book about science and poetry in the age of Darwin, to follow up The Age of Wonder. But when Covid closed the research libraries, I turned instead to the single life of Alfred Tennyson, many of whose papers and poems were available online, and whose wild deserted North Sea beaches – which I had known and loved since childhood – were still open to me.
What were the surprises you encountered along the way?
Three particularly : that Tennyson’s tutor at Trinity College Cambridge was William Whewell one of the great science writers of the age before Darwin. That Tennyson’s masterpiece In Memoriam took him 17 long years to write, and he refused to marry until it was finished. And that his lifelong friend Edward FitzGerald discussed both science and Persian poetry with him, and sent him the first copy of his own poem Omar Khayyam before he died: so one kind of masterpiece answering another.
Tell us how The Boundless Deep can be seen as a continuation or a departure from your earlier books?
Yes, it was a continuation of The Age of Wonder, exploring the connections between Romantic poets and their contemporary scientists. But instead of doing this with a group biography spread over two generations, I concentrated on the early life of a single remarkable Victorian poet, the exact contemporary of Darwin, who had educated himself in science during his first turbulent but forgotten forty years, and wrote brilliant original poetry about it, before emerging in 1850 as the conventional Poet Laureate whom everyone only half-remembers. I felt I had recovered a young Tennyson, refreshed and reborn !
What advice would you give a writer of non-fiction starting out today, given the current publishing climate?
Ignore the publishing climate, which is always changing anyway, and find a subject you can fall in love with for ever.
What’s next for you as an author?
As for next, it’s still a mystery: but exactly the kind of mystery I like, and I have a some 150 of my notebooks to explore…
