Resurrection Songs - The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Hardcover)

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49) was a powerful poet of the English Romantic period, who has been and is still strangely neglected by critics. His macabre blank verse dramatic writings and his delicately balanced lyrics have both won ardent admirers such as Browning, Gosse, Pound and Christopher Ricks. Yet there are formal and generic problems in Beddoes's writings which continue to marginalize him as merely an eccentric, and the canon of Romanticism seems to have found no place for him. This volume brings together the poet's abiding obsession - the search for immortality - and the most prominent structural feature of his texts - fragmentation. Michael Bradshaw examines how the idea of resurrection acts upon and is acted upon by the structures of Beddoes's texts. The study centres on the phenomenon of broken form on various levels, and charts the progressive involution and introversion of the theme. It addresses the texts' historical contexts, including Beddoes's relationships with Romantic forbears and the influence of his medical training, and establishes their relevance to the contemporary theoretical debates of Romanticism.