Here you can study the poet Beddoes. Beddoes' grotesque is thus an inseparable part of a less aesthetic and more existential approach than, say, Byron's, an approach which naturally ensured that he would never be, like Byron, a popular poet. For Beddoes, we are plunged into a world which, in spite of all the violence and irony, is still a world of morally significant choices:

I KNOW THE MOMENT: 'TIS A DREADFUL ONE,
WHICH IN THE LIFE OF EVERY ONE COMES ONCE;
WHEN FOR THE FRIGHTED HESITATING SOUL
HIGH HEAVEN AND LURING SIN WITH PROMISES
BID AND CONTEND.

This is the Duke talking himself into murdering Wolfram, and it is clear that Beddoes understands what some philosophers of resolute decision and Augenblick (a brief period of time, a moment) have not understood: that most resolute decisions are perverse and that a philosophy founded on the conception of resolute decision is off its head. The real resolute decision decision is much more likely to be a refusal to act rather than an action, like Wolfram's renunciation of revenge. This is a point that we shall find more fully developed in Shelley, from whom Beddoes partly derived it.

As Eliot (T.S.) says, the moment of death is every moment, and that absurdity is the only visible form of the meaning of life. It is Beddoes, as far as English Literature is concerned, who brings us most directly into contact with the conception of the absurd in a way that permits of compassion but excludes self-pity. ( )