Joseph Beaumont, D.D., 1615–1699, a descendant of the ancient family of the name in Leicestershire, was entered at Peterhouse, Cambridge, at the age of 16. He was elected Fellow and tutor, but was ejected in 1643. In 1663 he became master of his college. He attacked Dr. Henry More’s work, “The Mystery of Godliness,” published in 1665, and for his zeal received the thanks of the university, which elected him Professor of Divinity. His Poems in English and Latin were published in 1749, 4to, with an Appendix containing comments on the Epistle to the Colossians…. His principal work was “Psyche, or Love’s Mystery,” in 24 cantos, displaying the Intercourse between Christ and the Soul. This was begun in April, 1647, finished before the end of March, 1648, and published in the same year, folio. This poem was once very popular, but has been long neglected.

General

  This allegorical poem (“Psyche”) was not without its admirers in the last age. Giles Jacob calls it an invaluable work.

  In his capacity as author of “Psyche,” Beaumont is a forgotten rather than an “overlooked” poet. The work is said to have been once popular, and went through at least two editions folio; but readers of more recent days seldom have time or patience to grapple with so immoderate a task, and it is perhaps not surprising that even special students and compilers of the sacred poetry of that age have generally ignored it…. However much a poet by nature, he was rather a scholar by choice: he cared more for making acquaintance with the children of other men’s brains than for begetting or nourishing any of his own: the creative fire in him was smothered under so great a weight of paper and leather. For nearly his last half-century, he wrote no verses (unless a few in Latin), nor seems to have bestowed a thought on those he had written before. When a man is thus careless of his literary fame, he cannot expect others to be more careful; and in some cases the loss may be, and is, the world’s as well as his own.

  In 1644 he was one of the royalist fellows ejected from Cambridge, and he retired to his old home at Hadleigh, where he sat down to write his epic poem of “Psyche.” As this is of very great length, extending in its first form to twenty cantos, it is surprising to learn that its composition occupied Beaumont only eleven months.

  Beaumont, a strong cavalier and an orthodox churchmen, was a kind of adversary of More’s, whose length and quaintness he has exceeded, while he has almost rivalled his learning in “Psyche, or Love’s Mystery,” a religious poem of huge dimensions, first published in 1648 and later in 1702. Beaumont, as both fragments of this vast thing and his minor poems show, had fancy, taste, and almost genius on opportunity; but the prevailing mistake of his school, the idea that poetry is a fit vehicle for merely prosaic expression, is painfully apparent in him.

  To Dr. Beaumont belongs the honour of having written the longest poem in the English language…. The poem is marked by much facility of expression, and some power of imagery; but most of all by earnest religious feeling, touched with something of Crashaw’s mysticism and much of Herbert’s reverence for external symbolism. Alike in style and in subject, it forms a connecting link between the work of these poets and the “essay in verse” of the eighteenth century. Beaumont has nothing of Milton’s power of broad characterization; his good and evil spirits must be, as in Dante, painted with all the wealth of detail—delightful or repulsive—that a fertile imagination can supply. And this heaping together of imagery becomes wearisome in a poem where the philosophic and didactic predominate over the allegorical and descriptive.