A talk with Richard Holmes
Keats House: London, England
Thursday 15 October • 6:30 PM – 8 PM
Overview
Join Richard Holmes for a journey through Tennyson’s first forty years.
Perhaps you still remember the thundering rhythms of the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, written in 1854. Tennyson had become Poet Laureate, published his long poem ‘In Memoriam’, had happily married, and had just started growing his formidable Victorian Beard (which incidentally his wife Emily hated).
Richard Holmes wants to take you further back through Tennyson’s first forty years, full of so many surprises and revelations, including the disturbing influence of his drunken violent father; his childhood days spent alone on the wild Lincolnshire sea coast dreaming of monsters; and his formative time at Cambridge, where he gained a lifetime’s fascination with the beauties and terrors of science.
Richard will also look at the astonishing originality of the early poetry, not merely the hypnotic ballad ‘The Lady of Shalott’ but also ‘The Princess’, an entire poem dedicated to the controversial idea of a university exclusively for women, or his pre-Darwinian visions of ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’.
Richard hopes to give some glimpses of all this (with pictures), and of how he himself (in his bald and beardless eighties) got unexpectedly drawn to Alfred Tennyson (and his wild sea coasts and radiant star systems) after his own youthful flings with Shelley and Coleridge (and balloons).
Location
Keats House
10 Keats Grove
London NW3 2RR