Driving fate, from death to the eternal depths of fire
Driving fate, from death to the eternal depths of fire

Summary/Abstract: In an attempt to decipher the sources that triggered Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s lifelong obsession with death, the present paper proposes a reconsideration of the poet’s artistic creation in the light of his biography. Highly intelligent, and also extremely sensitive, guided by a rational eccentricity, but deeply immersed in the Romantic imagination, the poet created an original work, different from that of any other writer of the nineteenth century. He submitted himself to a self-imposed, unrestrained style of living that allowed him to explore both the philosophical and the physical nature of death, but in the process he became the prisoner of the destructive forces he was trying to unveil, thus crossing the point of no return in his slow-paced but straight road to suicide.

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