Selected Poems

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) is a latter-day Jacobean, the author of blank verse plays and poems which are as bold, wild and fresh as they are archaic in manner. We read his plays less for character and drama than for the miracles that occur in their language. He is a poet of fragments. His mastery of lyric and ballad make his work immediately accessible; an obsession with death aligns him with the Decadents.