诗人与灭绝的搏斗

Tennyson showed Victorian scientists how to embrace empiricism without abandoning faith, argues a biographer Renée Bergland Certain lines of Alfred Tennyson’s poetry are so familiar to English speakers that it is hard to imagine our language without them. How did people speak of heartbreak before Tennyson wrote, “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”? What would it be like to obey disagreeable orders without being able to murmur, “Theirs not to reason why”? Would evolution be as vivid or as comprehensible without Tennyson’s description of “Nature, red in tooth and claw”? Today, the poet is rarely invoked outside of these famous phrases. Yet in his own time, he was wildly famous. …