Robert Southey
English Romantic poet and Poet Laureate from 1813.
Robert Southey, born in 1774 and dying in 1843, was an English Romantic poet. He served as Poet Laureate from 1813 onward. His best-known works include the poem "After Blenheim" and the first version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears."
Quick Facts
- Office
- Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom
- Monarch
- George III
- George IV
- William IV
- Victoria
- Took office
- 12 August 1813
- Left office
- 21 March 1843
- Predecessor
- Henry James Pye
- Successor
- William Wordsworth
- Born
- 12 August 1774
- Birthplace
- Bristol, England
Facts from the source article.
Life
Robert Southey came into the world in Wine Street, Bristol, the child of Robert Southey and Margaret Hill. His schooling took him to Westminster School in London, but he was thrown out after writing a piece for The Flagellant, a magazine he had started himself, which claimed that the Devil came up with flogging. He then went to Balliol College, Oxford. Southey arrived at Oxford with a heart full of poetry and emotion, a mind full of Rousseau and Werther, and his religious beliefs unsettled by Gibbon. He later remarked that the only things he picked up there were a little swimming and a bit of boating. While at Oxford, he wrote a play called Wat Tyler, which his enemies later published in 1817, after he had become Poet Laureate, specifically to cause him trouble. He tried working with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and together they wrote The Fall of Robespierre. His first collection of poems came out in 1794. That same year, Southey, Coleridge, Robert Lovell, and a few others talked about setting up a perfect community, which they called pantisocracy, along the Susquehanna River in America. In 1795 he married Edith Fricker; her sister Sara later married Coleridge. That year he also went to Portugal and wrote Joan of Arc, which was published in 1796. After writing many ballads and visiting Spain in 1800, he made his home in the Lake District. In 1799, Southey and Coleridge took part in early tests with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, run by the scientist Humphry Davy. He received a government pension in 1807 and in 1809 began a long stretch with the Quarterly Review, which became nearly his only source of money for most of his life. He was named Poet Laureate in 1813, a role he grew to strongly dislike. In 1819, Southey went with the Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford, whom he called the "Colossus of Roads," to inspect Telford's projects in Scotland. These included the Caledonian Canal, which would open three years later, as well as many roads, bridges, and harbour works. Southey wrote about this trip in Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, giving detailed descriptions of Telford's engineering and his own views of the Scottish landscape and people.
Politics
Originally a radical supporter of the French Revolution, Southey followed Wordsworth and Coleridge toward conservatism. As Poet Laureate and from 1807 in receipt of a yearly stipend from the Tory establishment, he vigorously supported the Liverpool government. He argued against parliamentary reform, calling it "the railroad to ruin with the Devil for driver," blamed the Peterloo Massacre on an allegedly revolutionary "rabble," and spurned Catholic emancipation. In 1817 he privately proposed penal transportation for those guilty of libel or sedition, having in mind figures like Thomas Jonathan Wooler and William Hone, whose prosecution he urged. Such writers, he wrote in the Quarterly Review, were guilty of inflaming the turbulent temper of the manufacturer and disturbing the quiet attachment of the peasant to those institutions under which he and his fathers had dwelt in peace. Wooler and Hone were acquitted, but the threats caused William Cobbett to emigrate temporarily to the United States. In some respects Southey was ahead of his time on social reform: he was an early critic of the factory system's evils, appalled by living conditions in towns like Birmingham and Manchester and by child labour, and he spoke out about them. He sympathized with Robert Owen's pioneering socialist plans, advocated that the state promote public works to maintain high employment, and called for universal education. Less successful contemporaries who kept the faith attacked Southey, seeing him as selling out for money and respectability.
Reputation
Charles Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, stated that he was delighted and amazed by Joan of Arc, saying the poem alone was sufficient to redeem the character of the age from degeneracy in poetry, and that he expected Southey one day to rival Milton. Regarding Thalaba the Destroyer, Ernest Bernhard-Kabisch noted that few readers have been as enthusiastic about it as Cardinal Newman, who considered it the most "morally sublime" of English poems, but the young Shelley reckoned it his favorite poem, and both he and Keats followed its lead in some of their verse narratives. While Southey was writing Madoc, Coleridge believed the poem would be superior to the Aeneid. Southey had a notable influence on Russian literature: Pushkin highly appreciated his work, translating the beginning of the Hymn to the Penates and Madoc, and was inspired by the plot of Roderick to create an original poem. In the early 20th century, Southey was translated by Gumilyov and Lozinsky, and in 1922 the publishing house Vsemirnaya Literatura published the first separate edition of Southey's ballads in Russia, compiled by Gumilyov. A bilingual edition prepared by E. Witkowski was published in 2006. Southey was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1822 and was also a member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
Partial list of works
Southey's works include Harold, or, The Castle of Morford, an unpublished Robin Hood novel written in 1791; The Fall of Robespierre (1794) with Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Poems: Containing the Retrospect, Odes, Elegies, Sonnets, &c. with Robert Lovell; Joan of Arc (1796); Icelandic Poetry, or The Edda of Sæmund (1797); Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797); St. Patrick's Purgatory (1798); After Blenheim (1798); The Amatory Poems of Abel Shufflebottom (1799); The Devil's Thoughts (1799), revised in 1827 as The Devil's Walk, with Coleridge; English Eclogues (1799); The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them (1799); Thalaba the Destroyer (1801); The Inchcape Rock (1802); Madoc (1805); Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807); Chronicle of the Cid, from the Spanish (1808); The Curse of Kehama (1810); History of Brazil (3 vols., 1810–1819); The Life of Horatio, Lord Viscount Nelson (1813); Roderick the Last of the Goths (1814); Journal of a tour in the Netherlands in the autumn of 1815 (1902); Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (1817); Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem (1817, written in 1794); Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819 (1929 ed.); Cataract of Lodore (1820); The Life of Wesley; and Rise and Progress of Methodism (2 vols., 1820); What Are Little Boys Made Of? (1813); The Expedition of Orsua; and the Crimes of Aguirre (1821); A Vision of Judgement (1821); History of the Peninsular War, 1807–1814 (3 vols., 1823–1832); A Tale of Paraguay (1825); Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829); The Works of William Cowper, 15 vols., ed. (1833–1837); Lives of the British Admirals (5 vols., 1833–40); The Doctor (7 vols., 1834–1847), which includes The Story of the Three Bears (1837); and The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself (1837).
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