ABSTRACT
For a poet notoriously possessed by death, Thomas Lovell Beddoes appears only rarely to broach the question of immortality directly and specifically. He does not use the word very often. Beddoes's uncertain relationship with canonicity affects readings and re-readings with embarrassment, and seems to have impeded new assessments in the light of modern theoretical developments. As a Christian-era writer very preoccupied with a pagan tradition of thought, Beddoes evinces in such elusive passages the continuity of a problematic which may be innate to Platonic doctrines of the soul. The tendency of discourse on immortality to involve the convergence of the supposed opposition between body and soul forms an important context for Beddoes's writings, in which the violent collapse of binary systems is a recurrent structural configuration. Beddoes is frequently mannered in pointing to dualistic dichotomy, his language is consistently pulled by monistic sensations and implications.
