Robert Southey: Born 250 Years Ago

I haven’t tons to say about the English literary figure Robert Southey (1774-1843), but the fact that he was born a quarter of a millennium ago on this day seemed worth marking.

Southey is invariably associated with his cohorts among the Lake Poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, and yet unlike the other two his memory has retreated somewhat in relation to the public at large. This was already the case a century ago. For example, a World War One era compendium of English poetry I happen to own contains dozens of poems by Wordsworth, a half dozen by Coleridge…and one by Southey. Yet his contemporaries mentioned him in the same breath as Milton and Virgil, and in 1813 he was named Poet Laureate, a post he held until his death, to be succeeded by Wordsworth and then Tennyson.

Southey was also a historian, a fact that no doubt clouds his reputation as a poet. Today, his prose is considered superior to his verse. His evolution from a political radical of the Romantic Era into (it was charged) a job-seeking Tory, eventually lowered his esteem in the eyes of Byron and others. His early works such as the play The Fall of Robespierre (1794, co-written with Coleridge) and Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem (written in 1794, later exhumed and published by enemies in 1817 to embarrass him) speak to the democratic idealism of his earlier period. (More on his close relationship with Coleridge, including a Utopian scheme, here). Other notable Southey works included Joan of Arc (1796), English Eclogues (1799), Madoc (1805), and Chronicle of the Cid, from the Spanish (1808). His Life of Horatio, Lord Viscount Nelson (1813) has been a useful resource for my wife in her work on her graphic novel about Emma Hamilton. Then came Roderick, The Last of the Goths (1814), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1817), The Life of Wesley; and Rise and Progress of Methodism (1820), and Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), among dozens of other major works.

As a boy and young man, his influences included Epictetus,Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Spenser,Milton, Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon,William Godwin, Tom Paine, et al. He initially studied for a couple of terms at Balliol College Oxford, but found the stuffy pedantry suffocating, so after a period of brief personal turmoil he matriculated at Cambridge, which is where he met Coleridge.