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 derives from morality and symbol, from poetic language, and these are the vehicles of the drama as exciting theater. A packed, metaphorical idiom, bristling with allusion and learning, a boisterous humor that moves deliberately into the grotesque, a sense of terror before the omnipresence of death: such is the element of the extraordinary play in the composition of which Beddoes spent the most productive years of his life.

“To have my way, in spite of your tongue and reason's teeth, tastes better than Hungary wine; and my heart beats in a honey-pot now I reject you and all sober sense.” So speaks Mandrake, the disciple of Paracelsus, but it might well be Beddoes himself. Yet it was not in a “dérèglement de tous les sens” that he sought a freedom, but in an elusive grand synthesis in search of which he raided the culture, artistic and scientific, of the west. His poetry clearly reflects this search. From Hebrew lore to contemporary anatomy, from Pythagoras to Shelley, he roves back and forth through history, and the poetry is dense with references, literary and scientific, which reinforce and accentuate a genuine originality. Death's Jest Book may at times become pastiche on the one hand and chaos on the other. Brought up on a diet of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, Beddoes, like all his contemporaries who tried “dramaturgy”, never got free of the influence. Yet in this instance it is a happy fault, for no other of the romantic playwrights caught the idiom they echoed as fully as he did, and none had the sense of drama in the very feel of the verse to anything like the extent notable in the best parts of Death's Jest Book.

The play's plot is, “God save us, a thing of naught”, or rather, of a great deal too much, most of its confused. The satanic jester, Isbrand, usurps Melveric's dukedom—partly in vengeance for Melveric's murder of Isbrand's father and his brother Wolfram. As the plot to seize the duchy of Grussau culminates, Isbrand is betrayed and killed, Melveric drawn living into the grave, various other characters are variously slain. There is a sub-plot providing love interest, but plot is not the issue here.

To call such a congeries of implausibilities absurd is only proper; the action is eccentric; one cannot find a tragic hero or a single conflict. Beddoes alters his scheme and his intent more than once; the sub-plotting is at best irrelevant and at worst confusing as well as dull. The dramatic and poetic excitement resides in the by-play, and that for the most part concerns Isbrand, the demonic fool of Death, in whose actions and speeches we can find the essence of Beddoes' poetic gift and an adumbration at least of a form of tragedy.

Here excess is the key. Excess, calculated or at times merely chaotic, crowds into action, structure and metaphor. it is in this respect above all that Beddoes is a poet worthy of our attention, for he did not fear a risk, in particular that most dangerous of all risks: being caught out in a generalization or a cliché. And perhaps because he was remote from his contemporaries, because he was unafraid of traditional, stock situations, his best dramatic verse is exciting, in language, metaphor and movement. He had grasped what too few dramatists today believe, that the vehicle of a play is not character but language, a particular language that is theatrical in that it conveys the immediate action while it points ahead to impending tragedy. Consider this passage, in which Isbrand converses with one of his henchmen over the body of the treacherously slain Wolfram.

ISBRAND: … This was one who would be constant in friendship and the pole wanders: one who would be immortal, and the light that shines upon his pale forehead now, through yonder gewgaw window, undulated from its star hundreds of years ago. that is constancy, that is life. O moral nature!

SIEGFRIED: 'Tis well that you are reconciled to his lot and your own.

ISBRAND: Reconciled! A word out of a love tale, that's not in my language. No, no. I am patient and still and laborious, a good contented man; peaceable as an ass chewing a thistle; and my thistle is revenge. I do but whisper it now: but hereafter I will thunder the word, and I shall shoot up gigantic out of this pismire shape, and hurl the bolt of that revenge.

The modern obsession with personality concerns Beddoes little. Somehow he knew that character as such is one thing in life and quite another in art, in the drama. In either case seeing a man as a mere agglomeration of motives or qualities is little help and no explanation. Since in a play what interests the spectator is the thing done; the way it is done, and its effect on people or on further action, the establishing of character is merely one way of making an action seem credible or interesting. In the romantic period, one that was curious about emotion, morality and ideas, “character” of an intricate sort had little function in drama, for there was more than enough character available in actual life. In our day, when symbol and thing symbolized have split apart, “personality” has triumphed, with psychiatric quirks the stuff of drama and life alike. Beddoes, indifferent to this concern, instinctively returned to something like a doctrine of humors, of ruling passions, since his mind increasingly reached out for absolutes: the meaning of death, the vanity of human wishes, the nature of human freedom. What better convention, what more fascinating ritual, could he have chosen than the old revenge tragedy, with all its layers of association, its formal appeal to the spectators' powers of suspending disbelief, its open invitation to rhetoric and excess? We must not look to Death's Jest Book for originality of motive or plot; if there is a particular view of the action it would appear to be a double one. We are to see the events as deviations from a norm of moral behaviour and consequently to condemn them, but we are not to empathize automatically. One part of the mind must be reserved to participate in the poetic and dramatic processes, to judge of what allows one to be moved, and simultaneously to say: “That was a fine touch.”

What is new about his? It is so old that a revival of the attitude in the theater today would create an effect of extreme novelty that no experiment with gadgetry could rival. Beddoes found in the Jacobean drama certain habits of mind that corresponded to his own:

ISBRAND: … Isbrand, thou tragic fool,
Cheer up. Art thou alone? Why so should be
Creators and destroyers. I'll go brood,
And strain my burning and distracted soul
Against the naked spirit of the world
Till some portent's begotten.

Beddoes, unlike his Isbrand, knows that man is less than angel, and indeed at the end of the play Isbrand has well earned his cap and bells. “For now indeed Death makes a fool of me,” he says as he dies. And this was the same Isbrand who had earlier defied the universe:

I have a bit of FIAT in my soul,
And can myself create my little world.
Had I been born a four-legged child, methinks
I might have found the steps from dog to man,
And crept into his nature. Are there not
Those that fall down out of humanity,
Into the story where the four-legged dwell?

The lesson we can learn from Beddoes may go something like this: it is all a risk, this writing poetry and plays. Yet if art is going to be different enough from life to be worth bothering about, then make that difference exciting, excessive, bold. Poetry must reassemble the bones of the language and recreate “the bloody, soul-possessèd weed called man”, quickened out of sheer art, sheer creation.

But of course Beddoes is no playable dramatist. How stage the impossible slaughters, poisonings, tilts and apparitions? Perhaps there is no physical bar, but other more serious obstacles would confront the director. Beddoes had no stage craft, knew nothing at all about the theatre, his head full of Schiller and Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, of ideas about the stage that would make a modern producer shudder. And with reason. However promising the work of the inexperienced playwright may prove, it is only that. Beddoes had no chance to use a stage or to see his work performed; how could he have learned? Yet despite this, he had an attribute that is equally indispensable: he knew that language can be dramatic of itself and was able to make it so. No small measure of his success with dramatic language comes from his preoccupation with extremes, of subject and of expression. At times this becomes almost surrealist (if I understand the term), the driving to an extreme of fancy a conceit or an insight:

ISBRAND: … One has said, that time
Is a great river running to eternity.
Methinks 'tis all one water, and the fragments,
That crumble off our ever dwindling life,
Dropping into't, first make the twelve-houred circle, And that spreads outward to the great round Ever.
THORWALD: You're fanciful.
ISBRAND: A very ballad-maker …

There is often sarcasm or perhaps contempt in Isbrand's tone; he shares with the diabolic figures of much romantic verse a mocking attitude; like Goethe's Mephistopheles he has the “denying spirit”, though it is certainly not as objectively expressed. Yet he also shares some of the qualities of the Shakespearean fool, since his wisdom continually clashes with the nonsense of Everyman. The vengeance Isbrand seeks, the power he would usurp, becomes under Beddoes' hand generalized, as though the Duke and his Grussau are mere surrogates for a contempt Isbrand (and Beddoes) feels for humanity: “As I live I grow ashamed of the duality of my legs, for they and the apparel, forked or furbelowed, upon them constitute humanity; the brain no longer; and I wish I were an honest fellow of four shins when I look into the notebook of your absurdities. I will abdicate.” Isbrand is the intellectual who scorns the court, the world of mediocrity, yet maladjusted as he may be, there is no self-pity in him. “How I despise all such mere men of muscle,” he says, and proceeds with his plan to seize the dukedom. If the world will not conform to his desire, he will force it, by the power of his intellect, to serve him. No irony here, save what eventuates in dramatic irony; Isbrand is deadly serious, committed to a program that entails convulsions in the state. This intellectual, this eccentric of many masks and desires, will get beyond human weakness if he die for it; and this is true of Beddoes' writing of the role. Isbrand, when in his more playful mood, resorts to the grotesque, to a species of surrealism as the lighter expression of a demonic will. He is conscious that he is at court, “and there it were a sin to call anything by its right name.” Though he “abdicates”, ceases formally to be a jester, yet the role of poet is ready for him, another mask that he may wear until the plot is ripe and he may put off disguises.We can often identify Beddoes with Isbrand if only because the surrealist tone of much of the poetry in Death's Jest Book derives from the dominant attitudes of Beddoes himself, from his recondite learning, his necrophilia, his passion for an all-containing synthesis. The grotesque element in the poetry is mask—the playful aspect, at times grim, behind which Beddoes hides his contempt for man as he is, his yearning for another form more suited to man's will to change and grow. Hence death is welcome, for it may mean ultimately rebirth, a new and more appropriate form. Poetry, then, should distort life and all normal views of it. That is what Isbrand does when he wears the mask of poet. It is Beddoes' mask too, and both their tragedies; to make man over is impossible, yet the unusual man must try. Tragedy comes from that trial. Poetry comes from expressing it. A poetic tragedy is an excessive showing of excess.

If Beddoes' idea of tragedy seems inadequate, too far removed from the possibility of alternatives, too personal, it is at least modern, one that should find sympathetic consideration today. Isbrand, as he is dying, understands that he “in a wicked masque would play the Devil” and that there can be ruin only for such a player. The diabolism strikes home. Isbrand further says: “But jealous Lucifer himself appeared / And bore him—whither? I shall know tomorrow.” If there is to be real tragedy, a man must know in advance the risks he takes; both Beddoes and Isbrand see risks in the ways taken, but they do not know for sure the nature of the risks. They will “know tomorrow”. In the faint of heart, such uncertainty leads to scepticism, to irony, to the disillusionment of the sophisticated child. In those strong enough to face the bitterness of wanhope, there is this resort: gesture, mask, and finally, parody. We can find a full expression of this in one of the play's songs, a curious piece of work that revolted Beddoes' friend “Barry Cornwall” and is of one temper with the unease conveyed to Browning, who would neither release nor reread the Beddoes manuscripts entrusted to him. This song shows us what Beddoes was after, shows us perhaps why no tragedy could ever contain it.

“What is the lobster's tune while he is boiling?” asks Isbrand, and begins his “Song”. Whether one looks at the poem as a mere burlesque or as a whole genre by itself, there is still this question: how does critic or reader deal with such a work? For if we can call this irony, the word has finally lost any real meaning, and if we dismiss it as fanciful, grotesque, or Freudian we miss the point, a point we would do well to seize.

“SONG BY ISBRAND”

Squats on a toadstool under a tree
A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom,
Crying with frog voice, ‘What shall I be?
Poor unborn ghost, for my mother killed me
Scarcely alive in her wicked womb.
What shall I be? Shall I creep to the egg
That's cracking asunder yonder by Nile,
                                        And with eighteen toes
                                        And a snuff-taking nose,
Make an Egyptian crocodile?
Sing, “Catch a mummy by the leg
                                        And crunch him with an upper jaw,
                                        Wagging tail and clenching claw;
                                        Take a bill-full from my craw,
                                        Neighbor raven, caw, o caw,
                                        Grunt, my crocky, pretty maw!
                                                                                And give a paw.”
‘Swine, shall I be you? Thou art a dear dog;
But for a smile, and kiss, and pout,
I much prefer your black-lipped snout,
                                        Little, gruntless, fairy hog,
                                        Godson of the hawthorn hedge.
For, when Ringwood snuffs me out,
And ‘gins my tender paunch to grapple,
Sing, “'Twixt your ancles visage wedge
                                        And roll up like an apple.”
‘Serpent Lucifer, how do you do?
Of your worms and your snakes I'd be one or two;
                                        For in this dear planet of wool and of leather
'Tis pleasant to need neither shirt, sleeve, nor shoe,
                                        And have arm, leg, and belly together.
                                        Then aches your head, or are you lazy?
                                        Sing, “Round your neck your belly wrap,
                                        Tail atop, and make your cap
                                                                                Any bee and daisy.”
‘I'll not be a fool like the nightingale
Who sits up all midnight without any ale,
                                        Making a noise with his nose;
Nor a camel, although 'tis a beautiful back;
Nor a duck, notwithstanding the music of quack
                                        And the webby, mud-patting toes.
I'll be a new bird, with the head of an ass,
Two pigs' feet, two men's feet, and two of a hen;
Devil-winged; dragon-bellied; grave-jawed, because grass
Is a beard that's soon shaved, and grows seldom again
                                        Before it is summer, so cow all the rest;
                                        The new Dodo is finished. O! come to my nest.’

Isbrand's song is parody, parody of a cosmology of a scientific generation that will commit any sin in the name of science. Autobiography apart, we can see parody, self-parody, in the Isbrand who sings this ballad and in him who later, on the eve of his own destruction, declares: “I have a bit of FIAT in my soul”. One may play with ideas of evolution or metempsychosis if one chooses; certainly the Pythagorean theory was known to Beddoes. But it is the tone of mockery and excess that makes the poem wholly remarkable—unique in English verse. Poetry as play, serious and grim play but play none the less. One dares not label as nonsense a poem that explores with humor and learning the notion of man's free will, however idiosyncratically expressed. With his Mandrake, Beddoes might have said, “Thou knowest I hunger after wisdom as the Red Sea after ghosts”, and it is not strange that of the masks he chose one of the most effective should be that of the alchemistic fool: “soul of a pickle-herring, body of a spagirical toss-pot, doublet of motley, and mantle of pilgrim.” All of these personae were Beddoes, who had his bit of FIAT and died of it. If at times he doubted himself and his gifts, he never doubted that one of the proper functions of art is to show men their own folly, smallness and mortality: “O world, world! The gods and fairies left thee for thou were too wise; and now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee.” It is the logical paradox in Beddoes that his science should retain strong traces of alchemy, his poetry retain a firm grip on a tradition while it went far from the beaten path, his morality return to a kind of doctrine of humors while his own nature developed most involutely.

Isbrand says of his “noble hymn to the belly gods”, that “'tis perhaps a little / Too sweet and tender, but that is the fashion; / Besides my failing is too much sentiment,” but we must not consider this irony or mere sarcasm; it is one plane of the mask, this time a composite mask made up of every quality Beddoes found in the poet: fool, sage, demon, beast, and monster. What does his song show us if not the varied aspect of man's nature when he is most self-aware and creative? The “bodiless childfull of life” exerts will, a bit of FIAT, and selects at last no known form of life as its persona but the fabulous shape of the “new Dodo”, a monstrous form of its own birthing, for the child owes no tie to the parent that aborted it. Beddoes' abortion is an “unborn ghost” inhabiting a limbo closer to the real world than we suspect; if it is to come to life it will do so through its own will and in no ordinary guise, for “the world's man-crammed; we want no more of them.” The romantic agony of “anywhere, anywhere out of the world” was to Beddoes a real possibility, achievable through wisdom—science and art. These, energized by the will, could find the single secret of man's nature and force it to confess itself. That which much of Death's Jest Book states with seriousness and full conviction, Isbrand's song parodies—not for the sake of burlesque but as another aspect of the face of life, of man: the fool, the poet, the monstrous abortion who yet wills and selects his own mask: “I'll be a new bird with the head of an ass.” Man has such a head whether he knows it or not; “thou great-eared mind,” Isbrand calls Mandrake. “The world will see its ears in a glass no longer,” Mandrake laments now that he, the fool, is departing. “Every man is his own fool” and in his song Isbrand tells how to make the fool as unlike his usual self as possible, though however altered he may be, he will have “the head of an ass”.

We can consider this song as characteristic of Beddoes in his best vain of parody: excess, conceit, and surrealism. Here is the very “fool sublimate”, the formal arrangement of a disgust with human life that never makes the mistake of becoming pettish. Man has no place in the world of this song, nor will Beddoes allow his “new Dodo” any of man's features save his feet—two out of six, on equal ground with a pig's and a hen's. For the rest of the creature's anatomy Beddoes raids a representative stock of lore, finding actual and fabled beasts, a whole bestiary of humors and passions.“In this dear planet of wool and of leather” he finds monsters and beasts better equipped than man to withstand the rigors of climate, and a barnyard duck has a pleasanter sound than the nightingale, the foolish bird that “sits up all midnight without any ale, / Making a noise with his nose.” All normal and man-made standards shall be thrown down, all laws abandoned, all nature refashioned to suit the individual will. This has as much of the ethical as the artistic and intellectual; if not precisely “dérèglement de tous les sens”, something rather closer to a genuine rebirth of the spirit through wilful metamorphosis. Beddoes was far too serious as poet and scientist to write these verses with action in mind; this is the area of the grotesque, that portion of the poetic map where actuality and imagination meet in a balance so perfect that each mocks the other. We mistake the purpose of grotesque if we look in it for what is morbid or ironic or merely fanciful; it is a kind of vision which takes nothing seriously except itself, which comes from anger rather than sympathy, and which requires a lively sense of ugliness. To these ends nothing serves so well as a close association of the homely and the exotic, the exotic made homely and the homely alien. Hence, the “unborn ghost”, while debating the appropriateness of becoming “an Egyptian crocodile”, turns that formidable beast into a harmless absurdity, though the real nature is below this surface still. Again, addressing “serpent Lucifer”, the child talks of demon and reptile as if each were innocuous, though we realize that such natures are to be considered preferable to the human. In the final stanza, Beddoes gives his sardonic contempt free rein; all beasts, all monstrous forms, real and fabled, are to join in the forming of the “new Dodo”, and that portion of the “unborn ghost” not yet made flesh shall be cow: “So cow all the rest; / The new Dodo is finished. O come to my nest.” Contempt and anger, finely controlled, temper the tone, and the poem rises to a conclusion in which mingle colloquial gusto and a sinister “invitation au voyage”. As the song progresses, the rhythms become more marked, more solemn, belying the apparent lightness of statement; pauses are heavy and a broken line begins again after the caesura to rush through another line and a half, where suddenly the movement checks violently. With abrupt decision the creature completes its form and issues its sardonic invitation.

The world the creature asks us to enter is one of familiar shapes in strange combinations and positions. Entrance into such a world tests our acumen, for certain kinds of good poetry are so close to bad that the reader needs skill and taste in order to discriminate. Some kinds of bad work are more satisfying than some kinds of good, and the vices of a particular way of writing usually form the conditions of that writing's existence; that is, without the vices, there could be no writing of that sort at all. Beddoes had to be very derivative, bombastic, and coy in much of his poetry before he could suddenly generate sufficient heat to light off his power. Yet after Beddoes has made proper obeisance to the formal love-story, he can suddenly surcharge banality with poetry, as in the scene between Sibylla and the ghost of her murdered lover, Wolfram:

WOLFRAM: … Dar'st die?
A grave-deep question. Answer it religiously.
SIBYLLA: … With him I loved, I dared.
WOLFRAM: … With me and for me.
I am a ghost. Tremble not; fear not me.
The dead are ever good and innocent,
And love the living. They are cheerful creatures,
And quiet as the sunbeams, and most like,
In grace and patient love and spotless beauty,
The new-born of mankind. …

Similarly, in the more blood-curdling passages, one must keep a sharp lookout lest one mistake some fine poetry for fustian; they are both there:

ATHULF: Great and voluptuous Sin now seize upon me,
Thou paramour of Hell's fire-crowned king,
That showedst the tremulous fairness of thy bosom
In heaven, and so didst ravish the best angels …

Surely bad enough. Yet Isbrand, a few lines later, tells Athulf:

          … Sire and mother
And sister I had never, and so feel not
Why sin 'gainst them should count so doubly wicked,
This side o' th' sun. If you would wound your foe,
Get swords that pierce the mind: a bodily slice
Is cured by surgeon's butter …

If death is to a large extent the theme and subject of the play, Isbrand is death's jester, the fool of death who would turn the tables on his master only to become the more fool for his pains. At the last, Wolfram replaces on Isbrand's head the fool's cap; Sibylla's grave is decked with lilies of the valley, the plant that “bears bells”:

For even the plants, it seems, must have their fool,
So universal is the spirit of folly;
And whisper, to the nettles of her grave,
‘King Death hath assess' ears’.

Isbrand in a sense becomes so closely identified with Death that it is with something of a shock that we finally discover him to be mortal—no supernatural creature, despite his “bit of FIAT”, but a man and hence a fool. Early in the play he had tried to urge his laggard brother to join him in vengeance on the Duke; that was his greatest piece of folly, “for when he (his father's ghost) visits me in the night, screaming revenge, my heart forgets that my head wears a fool's cap …” If, as Mandrake says, “all days are foaled of one mother”, no man can hope to escape his lot; then indeed Isbrand and Mandrake can never be other than they are: the jesters of the world. And in the final issue, of course, men who had been fools of life are finally capped in death, becoming jesters, mocking the living and mocked at by King Death, who wears asses' ears himself. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” Beddoes would agree, and further shows that the result of man's overreaching himself can never be other than fatal:

ISBRAND: … What shall we add to man,
To bring him higher? I begin to think
That's a discovery I soon shall make.
Thus, owing naught to books, but being read
In the odd nature of much fish and fowl,
And cabbages and beasts, I've raised myself,
By this comparative philosophy,
Above your shoulders, my sage gentlemen.
Have patience but a little, and keep still;
I'll find means bye and bye of flying higher.

Isbrand here forgets that he had earlier remarked to the apostate jester, Mandrake, “I mark by thy talk that thou commencest philosopher, and then thou art only a fellow servant out of livery”: his own will, corrupted by power, has brought him to the point of believing he can transcend his humanity: “And man has tired of being merely human.”

Much of Death's Jest Book is fragmentary and suggestive. Occasionally there are prolepses of other poets, as in the passage immediately above. Or sometimes a packed parenthesis will suddenly lift the tone of a passage or take the reader, by powerful suggestion, into another dimension:

ISBRAND: … Were I buried like him
There in the very garrets of death's town,
But six feet under earth, (that's the grave's sky)
I'd jump up into life …
ZIBA: For soon the floral necromant brought forth
A wheel of amber, (such may Clotho use
When she spins lives) …

When he is going about his business properly, Beddoes is an economical writer in that he depends on verbs and strong verbal forms to do the heavy work: “I laid the lips of their two graves together, / And poured my brother into hers; while she, / Being the lightest, floated and ran over.” The macabre intent of Isbrand, the repulsive nature of the deed, strike us with the greater force because of connotation, here largely clustered about the verbs and arising from the image of liquor. At other moments he will give us poetic passages that are gently descriptive.

ZIBA: … For the drug, 'tis good:
There is a little hairy, green-eyed snake,
Of voice like to the woody nightingale.
And ever singing pitifully sweet,
That nestles in the barry bones of death,
And is his dearest pet and playfellow.
The honied froth about that serpent's tongue
Deserves not so his habitation's name
As does this liquor. That's the liquor for him.

or, direct and to the immediate point,

DUKE: … Nature's polluted,
There's man in every secret corner of her,
Doing damned wicked deeds. …

The thought of power can change Isbrand's expression “like sugar melting in a glass of poison”. Again, “Never since Hell laughed at the church, blood-drunken / From rack and wheel, has there been joy so mad / As that which stings my marrow now.” Isbrand's hour of triumph “will be all eternal heaven distilled / Down to one thick rich minute.” In such moments of the play, Beddoes does not need to conform to the exigencies of a character he has created, since that character is general, not a “personality”. Beddoes has left out of Death's Jest Book much that modern readers want to find if they are to feel at home, for the play frankly explores other realities, taking risks of a sort we either do not approve or can not see.

Still, the failure (and it is a failure) of Death's Jest Book derives not from the incomplete application of a technique, nor from a lack of talent, but from a spiritual malaise which, if nothing else, we share with Beddoes. We have a thousand writers who would worship “heroes of culture” with whom a failing artist may identify himself. The weaknesses and the pathos of these “heroes” are known, but many writers would prefer to be committed to the sins rather than to the literature, to the personality rather than the talent, for these are public and they pay off in fame, success. Pastiche, rather than eclecticism, determines such lives and works; we are closer to romantic mal du siècle than we like to think, for Hart Crane's alcohol-and-jazz Muse is easy of invocation, the nostalgics of Fitzgerald are less difficult to contrive and sustain than are the torments and passion of Dickens or Tennyson, for all their “sentimentality”. We somehow want genius to be less upsetting, tidier: the American writer is so accustomed to keeping his tongue in his cheek that he has trouble talking, and he who risks a direct high tone finds the shortest shrift. Yet it may be that we are ready for another kind of writing, another way of observing. R. P. Blackmur has shown us some of the uses of parody, has indicated how such a tactic may point a way out of the slough modern literature has foundered in. We could use another route. Whether we accept the way of parody or not, we ought to like Beddoes; he was a man for our time a century too soon, and his work defines certain excesses we may commit, certain risks we can take, if we would wrench out of the bog.