Thomas Lovell Beddoes is one of the most important and least-known poets of his age. Unique in his own right, he nevertheless defines the late Romantic movement and foreshadows early modernism. Once superficially classified as a neo-Jacobean--Lytton Strachey called him "the last Elizabethan"--in reality Beddoes brought to bear the generic authority and ambience of Renaissance drama on early modern experience; the results suggest an author having as much in common with Edgar Allan Poe, Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, and Franz Kafka as with such writers of his own age as Hartley Coleridge, George Darley, and Thomas Hood.

Beddoes's father, Thomas, known as the celebrated Dr. Beddoes of Bristol and a member of the Litchfield Circle, was a late-Enlightenment intellectual and political radical with careers in both medicine and experimental science; his rationalist legacy to the poet was matched by the creative and imaginative gifts of Beddoes's mother, Anna Edgeworth...