SOURCE: “Beddoes: The Mask of Parody,” in Hudson Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer, 1953, pp. 252-65.

In the following essay, Coxe praises the singularity and fearlessness of Death's Jest Book.

The poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes should find in our time a place denied it in its own if only because we are today interested in deviation for its own sake. Beddoes' life, curious and expatriate, a life that shows him as radical, scientist, psychiatric case and necrophile, alone would attract our age. The poetry, however, is the subject here, and it is a poetry of a sort that seems to me to offer a way out for the modern writer while it exists in its own world as a strange, viable creation.

Beddoes wished to be a dramatist. His major work, Death's Jest Book, shows at once the limitations, potentialities and achieved merits of his dramatic verse. Its texture...