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

THOMAS FORBES KELSALL, 1851

“How stately or enduring a monument he may, by the earnest cultivators of English poetic literature, be deemed to have himself erected in his works, this is not perhaps the fitting place in which to venture a prediction. In his life time, he may certainly be said to have strangely missed his fame: the most golden bough of ‘the everlasting singing-tree,’--the laudarier a laudatis,--as posthumous events have shown, lay already within his reach, would he but have stretched his hands to gather it. But even the full and open requital of these his actual, though hidden, claims of distinction, would still have left, for those who best knew that creative mind in all its undeveloped power, the larger portion of their Hope unsatisfied.”

(The Poems Posthumous and Collected of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, “Memoir,” vol. I, p. cxvi)

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