Beddoes poses a peculiar problem for critics and scholars who wish to redress the marginal position that he occupies in the Romantic canon--a problem seemingly unique to him, and created in part by his misconception of his own strengths as a writer. An extremely good poet who, had things turned out differently, might have functioned as a missing link between Keats and Tennyson, he fatally divided his attention between verse and medicine, a discipline that by his own admission (made in the poem composed for ZoeKing) served to wither his creative gift. This fission of energy was bad enough, but...