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

RICHARD GARNETT, 1894

“In all strictly poetical endowments he is most affluent, it is only when he of necessity forsakes the realm of pure poetry that he becomes awkward and ineffectual. He had chosen the drama for his special field—-unwisely it might have been said, had his overmastering enthusiasm for the Elizabethan stage allowed him any alternative...He is, however, much more than a writer of exquisite fragments, for his beauties, isolated and disjointed in themselves, are yet inspired with a continuity of feeling, and taken altogether, and especially when read in connection with his letters, form a kind of autobiographic poem, a comment on a character of striking originality and interest. The physiologist and psychologist may learn much from the only English poet whose mind has been deeply tinged by a medical training: but he is especially a poet for poets, readers who can prize the massy ore of poetry, even when it has failed to receive the stamp of artistic finish. Pure ore it is at least: after Shelley and Keats no poet is freer from admixture with inferior matter. Things invariably present themselves to him under their most picturesque and imaginative aspects, and it would be hard to bring him in guilty of a single commonplace. As a lyrical writer he is curiously unequal; some of his pieces are formless and tuneless; while others have placed him among the best lyrists in the language.”

(The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, John Keats to Lord Lytton, ed. Miles, p.522)

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