Excerpt from Currents and Eddies in the English Romantic Generation IF literary history is exclusively the interpretation of great literature, it should confine itself to masters and masterpieces. But if it be also a lesson from past ages for our own, it must interpret those minor figures who, more than the giants, because they are more numerous and pliant, form the thought currents of the day. And if, further, history be a panorama of the human drama called life, who would reject entirely the comedy of the vain poetaster or the tragedy of the broken minor who was, the great poet who might have been? We make no pretence of having allotted space to each author in exact proportion to his literary merits, and we know that we have mentioned several people whom it is better to read about than to read. But it was only by this means, we thought, that we could present a brilliant transitional age in its habit as it lived. If we have said more about the environment of poets than about the magic qualities of their verse, it is because the latter task has already been so well done by Professor Beers, Professor Elton, Mr. Arthur Symons, and others. May this book throw a little light on those ill-understood forces atwvork in life, some for the encouragement too many for the destruction - of incipient poetry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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This title was first published in 2001. 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.