ABSTRACT
The late poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, from the mid-1830s until his death, shows a development in poetic style that is both revisionary and regenerative, both backward- and forward-looking. The martial clatter of iconic and iconoclastic imagery, found in much of the dramatic blank verse and many of the grotesque lyrics, has been taken up by the German propaganda writings in prose and verse, while Beddoes's English poetry moves decisively into looser and more fluid styles, and the poet makes a mature reacquaintance with the tender death-wish genre be explored in his youth. The prototype for Beddoes's use of the afterlife as political metaphor in the 1830s and 1840s is the unfinished poem 'Doomsday', which he probably wrote in 1830.
