Audiobook

Poetical Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Volume 1

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

The English poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in Clifton in Bristol and educated at Pembroke College, Oxford. He later studied medicine at Göttingen in Germany before leading an itinerant life in Germany and Switzerland and committing suicide at the age of 45. His early verse drama The Bride's Tragedy was well reviewed but later attempts at dramas were mostly left incomplete. His Collected Poems were published 2 years after his death. The poems read here are from a later edition of his complete Poetical Works published in 1890 by Edmund Gosse. They are in 3 sections: Poems Collected in 1851, Poems Hitherto Unpublished, and Miscellaneous Poems. Beddoes had a preoccupation with death, he studied medicine in the hope of finding clinical evidence of the existence of an immortal soul, and this preoccupation influenced much of his work. Lytton Strachey described Beddoes as "the last Elizabethan", and said that he was distinguished not for his "illuminating views on men and things, or for a philosophy", but for the quality of his expression. - Summary by Alan Mapstone