Phantom-Wooer: The Thomas Lovell Beddoes Web Site | Critical Response

THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES, 1877

“Beddoes is a poet for poets, and few other readers will enjoy him. He is ‘of imagination all compact;’ his works scarcely contain a single passage of purely subjective feeling. He is, perhaps, the most concrete poet of his day; the most disposed to express sentiment by imagery and material symbolism. In this he resembles Keats, and may be termed a Gothic Keats, the Teutonic counterpart of his more celebrated contemporary’s Hellenism. The spirit of Gothic architecture seems to live in his verse, its grandeur and grotesqueness, its mystery and its gloom. His relation to the Elizabethan dramatists, moreover, is nearly the same as that of Keats to the Elizabethan pastoral poets; but the resemblance is one of innate temperament; he borrowed nothing, either from his Elizabethan precursors or the chief objects of his admiration among his contemporaries, Keats and Shelley. The want of constructive power which mars his dramas is even more prejudicial to his lyrics; but some few songs, where the right key note has been struck from the first, rank among the most perfect in our language.”

(Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth ed., vol. III, p. 415)

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