BEDDOES is a poet whose life and work have never
been portrayed in organic relation ; -nor does Mr. Donner in his long introduction to this Muses Library selection succeed in making good the lack. Mr. Donner is not content to accept the fragmentary nature of the poet's writing and the growing disintegration of his life without seeking for a common root-cause. The answer that he offers, however, does not satisfy our sense of the probable. Without so much as mentioning the word, Mr. Donner brusquely ignores the idea that Beddoesf*as—at least—a repressed homosexual, and that certain incidents in his life, his. attempts at suicide, for example, as well as his melancholia and the way in which—in his later work-- he frequently equated love and death, are most feasibly interpreted in light of this conjecture. His own theory is that the poet's fascina- tion with the furniture and accoutrements of death (derived from recollections of hit, father's dissecting) became a living reality for him when his mother died in his twenty-first year. The grief Mr. Donner attributes to the poet seems hardly borne out by his letters at that time describing the opera at Paris and the sprightly beauties of Florentine nights.
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