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

GEORGE SAINTSBURY, 1896

“Except Donne, there is perhaps no English poet more difficult to write about, so as to preserve the due pitch of enthusiasm on the one hand and criticism on the other, than Thomas Lovell Beddoes...Beddoes has sometimes been treated as a mainly bookish poet deriving from the Elizabethans and Shelley. I cannot agree with this. His very earliest work, written when he could not know much either of Shelley or Keats, shows as they do technique perhaps caught from Leigh Hunt. But this is quite dropped later; and his Elizabethanism is not imitation but inspiration. In this inspiration he does not follow but shares with, his greater contemporaries. He is a younger and tragic counterpart to Charles Lamb in the intensity with which he has imbibed the Elizabethan spirit, rather from the nightshade of Webster and Tourneur than from the vine of Shakespeare. As wholes, his works are naught, or naught but nightmares; though ‘Death’s Jest-Book,’ despite its infinite disadvantages from constant rewriting and uncertainty of final form, has a strong grasp. But they contain passages, especially lyrics, of the most exquisite fancy and music, such as since the seventeenth century none but Blake and Coleridge had given...The author of such things as the ‘Dirge for Wolfram’ (‘If thou wilt ease thine heart’) in ‘Death’s Jest-Book,’ and the stanza beginning ‘Dream-Pedlary,’ ‘If there were dreams to sell,’ with not a few others of the same kind, attains to that small and disputed--but not to those who have thought out the nature of poetry disputable--class of poets who, including Sappho, Catullus, some mediæval hymn-writers, and a few moderns, especially Coleridge, have, by virtue of fragments only, attained a higher position than many authors of large, substantive, and important poems.”

(A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, pp. 114, 115)

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