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  • The Ivory Gate: Later Poems & Fragments
  • John H. Baker
The Ivory Gate: Later Poems & Fragments. By Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Edited by Alan Halsey. Hastings: ReScript Books, 2011. Pp. 120. ISBN 978 1 874400 49 3. £9.00.

When Thomas Lovell Beddoes died a lonely death by his own hand in January 1849 he had published no poetry for almost thirty years. Born in 1803, the son of a notable physician and friend of Coleridge, he had seemed on the brink of literary fame with the publication of his play The Bride’s Tragedy in 1822, which had won him considerable praise before his twentieth birthday. For a brief period he seemed likely to win the youthful success that had eluded Keats, a slightly older contemporary. It was not, however, to be – he failed to complete four more abortive plays in the following two years, and in 1825 left England to pursue medical studies in Germany. He would only return to England (a country he despised) once, in 1846. For the rest of his life he led a strange and lonely existence, wandering across Europe while pursuing his studies and espousing radical political ideals that frequently attracted the attention of the authorities. When he committed suicide by swallowing poison in Switzerland at the age of forty-five the promise of his youth must have seemed aeons away.

Yet although much of Beddoes’s energy was consumed by scientific work and political activism he continued to write, on and off, throughout this period. In 1829 he had completed the first version of Death’s Jest-Book, a huge and rambling revenge tragedy generally now regarded as his greatest achievement. His few friends back in England strongly advised him not to publish such a sprawling and eccentric work, however, and Beddoes continued to tinker with the play in a desultory fashion for the next twenty years without ever seeking publication. Conventional wisdom has relegated Beddoes’s erratic poetic production during these strange and peripatetic years to the status of ‘scattered and outlying fragments of Death’s Jest-Book’s ruins’, in Alan Halsey’s words, and it is true that much of the work that survives from this period was incorporated into that bizarre play.

Halsey, himself a poet, is one of Beddoes’s few modern-day champions. He edited the later edition of Death’s Jest-Book, incorporating Beddoes’s additions, for publication for the first time in 2003; this new collection, The Ivory Gate, publishes Beddoes’s surviving ‘later poems and fragments’ for the first time in a single volume. Halsey hopes that his decision to gather together these works (all of which have been published before, but across several volumes, some long out of print) ‘will offer a different and provocative perspective’ on Beddoes’s later years. [End Page 70]

In compiling this volume Halsey has made the striking decision to omit long-familiar poem titles that do not seem to have been Beddoes’s own. Many of Beddoes’s poems were given titles by his editors, Thomas Kelsall, Edmund Gosse and H. W. Donner, and, in Halsey’s words, this sometimes served to make the poems ‘conformable to Victorian conventions which were […] alien to Beddoes’s cast of mind’. Halsey is determined to ‘strip his later work […] of any paraphernalia not of his own making: to present the poems and fragments as they might have appeared in one of his own notebooks’. This is certainly the effect achieved; the reader of this volume is confronted with a strange assortment of complete poems (sometimes accompanied by relevant material from Beddoes’s letters, into which they were originally incorporated), speeches and lyrics inserted into the later version of Death’s Jest-Book and the briefest of fragments found in Beddoes’s notebooks, including single lines.

The collection begins with the surviving fragments of The Ivory Gate, a collection of ‘prosaic poetry and poetical prose’ that Beddoes assembled in 1837 but never seems to have tried to publish. It would have been an extremely heterogeneous volume, binding together a number of prose tales (Beddoes spoke of six, but seems to have completed only four) with a larger number of lyrical...

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