2 Books Like Rock Crystal

I taught Tennyson’s major poems to university students for many, many years. I love these poems with all my heart, and what the historian and biographer Richard Holmes has done is give them back to me, fresh, vital, immediate, urgent, moving, miraculous.

Holmes demonstrates his lucid and masterful power of interpretation when he gives us a close reading of the language, form, and register of these poems. He places Tennyson in the midst of the intellectual tidal waves of his times: the religious upheaval unleashed by new scientific perceptions, the revolutionary debates on our origins with Charles Darwin at the core, the astronomical revelations of the vast universe around us.

Tennyson’s extraordinary elegy for his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, "In Memoriam AHH," is a central document in the history of Victorian poetry and should be in our times too.

I first read this wonderful book in manuscript. This is a moving history of a queer male community, right at the heart of the British establishment, associated with King’s College, Cambridge.

The stories woven together by Professor Goldhill are filled with gossip, scandal, revelations, startling connections, delightful tales of lust, quarrels, thwarted desire, and pure pleasure. Goldhill’s research is meticulous, and he writes with gripping lucidity. Some of his characters, such as E.M.Forster, Rupert Brooke, and M.R. James are well known. But many untold and extraordinary stories are to be found here, too.

The decades covered by the narrative stretch from the 19th century through the first part of the 20th century, a period when homosexuality was illegal and then gradually, if often grudgingly, accepted.