Beddoes poses a peculiar problem for critics and scholars who wish to redress the marginal position that he occupies in the Romantic canon – a problem seemingly unique to him, and created in part by his misconception of his own strengths as a writer. An extremely good poet who, had things turned out differently, might have functioned as a missing link between Keats and Tennyson, he fatally divided his attention between verse and medicine, a discipline that by his own admission (made in the poem composed for Zoë King) served to wither his creative gift. This fission of energy was bad enough, but more damaging still was his misconception of metier, for whatever mental resources remained to Beddoes after gruelling days in the classroom he invested in writing an unstageable drama instead of in his primary gift for lyric verse.

Whereas the Beddoes revival that has been gathering momentum in recent years has centred on Death's Jest-Book, the play onto which the poet directed – some might say ‘misdirected’ – so much of his creative energy, this study focuses wholly on his lyric and narrative verse, much of which has received short critical shrift. It follows the sequence of poems set out in the Donner edition, and focuses on their verbal richness and inventiveness as they unspool upon the page.