SOURCE: "A Spectral Beauty: The Writings of Richard Middleton," in English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1974, pp. 185-96.

Ferguson is an American educator and author of essays and reviews of modern and Victorian literature. In the following excerpt, she offers a thematic overview of Middleton's poetry, essays, and short stories.

An aesthete just a few years past the time when his gifts and prejudices might have been better appreciated, Middleton wrote poetry and essays that recall in general the best lyric poetry and the sophisticated magazine essays of the nineties. His imagery, in the poetry, is drawn from the most traditional of sources: sea and stars, flowers and rural landscapes, light and dark, music, especially the songs of birds, and sometimes from earlier poetic traditions, especially pastoralism. His poetic subjects are love and death; his chief influences apparently the Elizabethans, Donne and Marvell, and Keats, while the...