Publisher's Synopsis
Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803û49) was a powerful poet of the English Romantic period who has been, and is still, strangely neglected by critics. His macabre blank verse and finely balanced lyrics have both won ardent admirers such as Browning, Gosse, Pound and Christopher Ricks. His enormous pastiche tragedy Death's Jest-Book stands as one of the most intense Romantic meditations on death and the body. Yet there are formal and generic problems in Beddoes's writings which continue to marginalise him as merely an eccentric, and the canon of Romanticism has found no place for him. - - Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes brings together the poet's abiding obsession û the search for immortality û and the most prominent formal feature of his writing û fragmentation. Michael Bradshaw examines how the idea of resurrection acts upon and is acted upon by the structural disarray of Beddoes's texts. The study centres on the phenomenon of broken form on various levels, and charts the progressive involution of the theme. Addressing contexts such as Beddoes's relationships with Romantic and Renaissance forbears, and the influence of his medical training, Resurrection Songs is a timely re-assessment which establishes Beddoe's relevance to the contemporary debates of Romanticism.
