SOURCE: “The Survival of Thomas Lovell Beddoes,” in Spirit of Time and Place: Collected Essays of Horace Gregory, W.W. Norton, 1957, pp. 42-51.

In the following essay, originally published in 1935, Gregory determines the influence of the Gothic imagination on Beddoes's work.

If the temptation exists to place Beddoes in biographical proximity to Byron, an even greater temptation to view him as a belated Elizabethan has not been resisted. If we could be content with a second glance at Beddoes's works in the huge, eight-hundred-page volume, so devotedly, almost devoutly edited by Dr. H. W. Donner,¹ we would agree with the reiterated opinions of Lytton Strachey, which were dutifully followed by F. L. Lucas, and George Saintsbury. All opinions chimed to the belated Elizabethan character of Beddoes's poetry—nor was the epithet entirely without foundation. Beddoes's literary indebtedness to Marlowe, Marston, Webster, and Tourneur was of no inconsiderable weight...