Thomas Lovell Beddoes by Alice Meynell

Name: Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Author: Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell’s “Thomas Lovell Beddoes” is a severe critical essay arguing that Beddoes deserves a distinct but limited place in literary memory: not as a major poet, but as an isolated, talented imitator caught between exhausted Romanticism and the later revival of English poetry. Meynell begins by distinguishing writers who may be forgotten collectively from those who must be forgotten individually. Beddoes, she says, cannot simply vanish into a “school,” because his odd historical position separates him. He wrote Elizabethan tragedy in the nineteenth century, imitated Keats in couplets, and echoed Shelley in lyrics; this made him conspicuous without making him great. His tragedy, in Meynell’s view, is partly the tragedy of timing: he lived after Shelley and Keats were dead, Wordsworth and Coleridge were spent, and before the next poetic awakening was visible. He knew he was living in a poetic lull and reacted by clinging desperately to the recent and distant past. Much of the essay attacks Beddoes’s imitative verse. His Keatsian couplets are presented as weak, slack, and structurally dependent, reproducing not Keats’s greatness but the faults of Endymion: loose rhymes, collapsing syntax, and feeble line endings. Meynell gives examples to show how Beddoes borrows a manner without commanding it. His Elizabethan dramatic imitation, especially in The Bride’s Tragedy, is treated more respectfully. He understood the outward qualities of Elizabethan drama: violent passions, royal and barbaric settings, madness, murder, theatrical unnaturalness, and the mingling of prettiness with horror. Yet even here he wavers into nineteenth-century sentimentalism, which damages the illusion. He can imitate Elizabethan action, but not always Elizabethan feeling. Meynell repeatedly measures Beddoes against stronger poets. Rossetti’s “lidless eyes in hell” terrify because they belong to human suffering; Beddoes gives such horror to a dragon, where it becomes empty decoration. His Shelleyan moments are better: in a few lyrics he catches something of Shelley’s evasive delicacy and strangeness. Meynell singles out phrases and songs such as “Bee of hearts,” “Dream-Pedlary,” and images from “Concealed Joy” as rare successes where fancy, tenderness, or vividness briefly overcome imitation. The essay also judges Beddoes’s obsession with death and madness. Meynell places the poetry of madness within a long English tradition, from Tom o’Bedlam to Ophelia-like songs, but finds Beddoes insufficiently simple or imaginative to join the greatest examples. His death lyrics seem to her more “German” and grim than magical; his grimness lacks humour, and his macabre effects often feel labored. Overall, Meynell’s synopsis of Beddoes is that he was gifted, historically unlucky, and genuinely unusual, but not a poet of commanding originality. His work is worth noticing because it fails separately: he is not merely one forgotten minor poet among many, but a distinctive figure whose imitations, flashes of beauty, morbid imagination, and misplaced Elizabethanism make his obscurity a special case.

By Alice Meynell · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Biographical Essay, Poetry Criticism · 1,612 words

First lines

There are some writers whom the judicious reader forgets by name, with the express intention of clearing them away. For oblivion is not always a slovenly thing. It is sometimes directed with no slight care, and has regard to all the distinctive characteristics of the one to be forgotten, effacing him with every possible precision, good aim, and attention. Others, again, it is more convenient to forget in little companies, according to their ‘school'; and there is no great precision necessary for picking them off. You shoot, as it were, ‘into the brown', for they go close-ranked.

Open reader

What this Textopian page supports

Thomas Lovell Beddoes is listed on Textopian as an essay by Alice Meynell, dated 1922 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Work type: Essay
Author: Alice Meynell
Date: 1922 CE
Language: English
Genres: Literary Criticism, Biographical Essay, Poetry Criticism, Drama Criticism, Romantic Literary Studies
Length: 1,612 words
Structure: 1 section, 21 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)

Good citation fit

Work identity for Thomas Lovell Beddoes by Alice Meynell
Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
Readability and classroom-planning context
Passage-specific claims should cite the exact /read/ URL for the relevant chapter or paragraph

Similar titles

Genres

Literary Criticism — The work is primarily a critical assessment of Thomas Lovell Beddoes's poetry, dramatic writing, imitation of earlier poets, style, limitations, and literary position.
Biographical Essay — The essay discusses Beddoes as a literary figure, interpreting his career, temperament, historical situation, and artistic failures through the lens of his life and era.
Poetry Criticism — Much of the work evaluates Beddoes's couplets, lyrics, blank verse, death poetry, imagery, and debts to Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Elizabethan models.
Drama Criticism — The essay gives sustained attention to Beddoes's Elizabethan-style tragedy, especially The Bride's Tragedy, analyzing its passions, madness, murder, theatrical conventions, and dramatic imitation.