And his description of his own revels applies no less to the whole atmosphere of Beddoes’ tragedies: 

    Voices were heard, most loud, which no man owned: 
    There were more shadows too than there were men;
    And all the air more dark and thick than night
    Was heavy, as ’twere made of something more
    Than living breaths.

It would be vain to look, among such spectral imaginings as these, for guidance in practical affairs, or for illuminating views on men and things, or for a philosophy, or, in short, for anything which may be called a ‘criticism of life.’  If a poet must be a critic of life, Beddoes was certainly no poet.  He belongs to the class of writers of which, in English literature, Spenser, Keats, and Milton are the dominant figures—­the writers who are great merely because of their art.  Sir James Stephen was only telling the truth when he remarked that Milton might have put all that he had to say in Paradise Lost into a prose pamphlet of two or three pages.  But who cares about what Milton had to say?  It is his way of saying it that matters; it is his expression.  Take away the expression from the Satires of Pope, or from The Excursion, and, though you will destroy the poems, you will leave behind a great mass of thought.  Take away the expression from Hyperion, and you will leave nothing at all.  To ask which is the better of the two styles is like asking whether a peach is better than a rose, because, both being beautiful, you can eat the one and not the other.  At any rate, Beddoes is among the roses:  it is in his expression that his greatness lies.  His verse is an instrument of many modulations, of exquisite delicacy, of strange suggestiveness, of amazing power.  Playing on it, he can give utterance to the subtlest visions, such as this: 

    Just now a beam of joy hung on his eyelash;
    But, as I looked, it sunk into his eye,
    Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings
    Into a darkening hole.

Or to the most marvellous of vague and vast conceptions, such as this: 

          I begin to hear
    Strange but sweet sounds, and the loud rocky dashing
    Of waves, where time into Eternity
    Falls over ruined worlds.

Or he can evoke sensations of pure loveliness, such as these: 

    So fair a creature! of such charms compact
    As nature stints elsewhere:  which you may find
    Under the tender eyelid of a serpent,
    Or in the gurge of a kiss-coloured rose,
    By drops and sparks:  but when she moves, you see,
    Like water from a crystal overfilled,
    Fresh beauty tremble out of her and lave
    Her fair sides to the ground.

Or he can put into a single line all the long memories of adoration: 

          My love was much;
    My life but an inhabitant of his.

Or he can pass in a moment from tiny sweetness to colossal turmoil: