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

HENRY WOOD, 1883

“Buffon said, ‘Show me the style and I’ll show you the man’ [le style est de l’homme même]. Puttenham (Arte of English Poesie, 1589, p. 161) wrote with equal justice: ‘his [man’s] inward conceits be the metall of his minde, and his manner of utterance the very warp and woofe of his conceits;’ or, in other words, ‘show me the man, and I’ll show you his style.’ Beddoes’ Poems and Letters are one more welcome illustration of the truth of Buffon’s observation; but, in a far higher sense, of Puttenham’s. Here the style is the direct, necessary expression of the writer’s inmost nature. Since he was in the highest degree original, the fact has a significance, in matters of English style, far deeper than has been attributed to it...If we class the characteristic works in English literature with reference to the history of style into three periods, the Anglo-Saxon epic style and Shakspeare represent two of them. The third has no complete representative, but among its most significant writers (style being here assumed to have little more to do with constructive power than in the case of the Anglo-Saxon poets) is Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Beddoes’ intimate connection with Shakspeare in point, thought and style, is so marked that he has been called an Elizabethan, ‘a strayed singer,’ and the like.”

(“T. L. Beddoes, A Survival in Style,” American Journal of Philology, vol. 4, pp. 445, 446)

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