29 - Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon

Summary

It is a melancholy thought that poets of the 1820s and 1830s have often been defined by what they were not, by what they almost were, but failed to be. Keats died in 1821, Percy Shelley in 1822 and Byron in 1824 – and what then? Well, then of course there was a gap, before the early work of Tennyson. Arnold’s image of ‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born’ now seems perfect for the strained, stranded sensibilities of a poet like George Darley. The poets themselves could sometimes be gloomy about the prospects for their generation:

The disappearance of Shelley from the world seems, like the tropical setting of that luminary (aside, I hate that word) to which his poetical genius alone can be compared with reference to the companions of his day, to have been followed by instant darkness and owl-season: whether the vociferous Darley is to be the comet, or tender, fullfaced L. E. L. the milk-and watery moon of our darkness, are questions for the astrologers: if I were the literary weather-guesser for 1825 I would safely prognosticate fog, rain, blight in due succession for it’s [sic] dullard months.

Beddoes is a harsh judge of the work of nearly all his contemporaries, and he does not spare himself. And yet, leaving England in 1825 for a lifetime of wandering in Europe, he gradually lost his feel for the contemporary literary scene, continuing to imagine English poetry in this post-Shelleyan limbo of the early 1820s, and mourning the absence of revolutionary prophecy well into the reign of Victoria. Beddoes always had a talent for anachronism. Yet his letters somehow make a ‘true’ epitaph for his generation, as the sensuous idioms of Romanticism reverberated into modernity.