Robert Southey
born Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol, Gloucestershire,
Eng.
died March 21, 1843, Keswick, Cumberland
English poet and writer of miscellaneous prose
who is chiefly remembered for his association
with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William
Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the
early Romantic movement.
The son of a linen draper, Southey spent much of
his childhood at Bath in the care of his aunt,
Elizabeth Tyler. Educated at Westminster School
and Balliol College, Oxford, Southey expressed
his ardent sympathy for the French Revolution in
the long poem Joan of Arc (published 1796). He
first met Coleridge, who shared his views, in
1794, and together they wrote a verse drama, The
Fall of Robespierre (1794). After leaving Oxford
without a degree, Southey planned to carry out
Coleridge’s project for a pantisocracy, or
utopian agricultural community, to be located on
the banks of the Susquehanna River, in the
United States. But his interest in pantisocracy
faded, causing a temporary breach with
Coleridge.
In 1795 he secretly married Edith Fricker,
whose sister, Sara, Coleridge was soon to marry.
That same year he went to Portugal with his
uncle, who was the British chaplain in Lisbon.
While in Portugal he wrote the letters published
as Letters Written During a Short Residence in
Spain and Portugal (1797), studied the
literature of those two countries, and learned
to “thank God [he was] an Englishman.” So began
the change from revolutionary to Tory.
In 1797 he began to receive an annuity of
£160 that was paid to him for nine years by an
old Westminster school friend, Charles Wynn, and
in 1797–99 he published a second volume of his
Poems. In these years he composed many of his
best short poems and ballads and became a
regular contributor to newspapers and reviews.
Southey also did translations, edited the works
of Thomas Chatterton, completed the epic Thalaba
the Destroyer (1801), and worked on the epic
poem Madoc (1805).
In 1803 the Southeys visited the Coleridges,
then living at Greta Hall, Keswick. The Southeys
remained at Greta Hall for life, partly so that
Sara and Edith could be together. Southey’s
friendship with Wordsworth, then at nearby
Grasmere, dates from this time. The Southeys had
seven children of their own, and, after
Coleridge left his family for Malta, the whole
household was economically dependent on Southey.
He was forced to produce unremittingly—poetry,
criticism, history, biography, journalism,
translations, and editions of earlier writers.
During 1809–38 he wrote, for the Tory Quarterly
Review, 95 political articles, for each of which
he received £100. Of most interest today are
those articles urging the state provision of
“social services.” He also worked on a projected
history of Portugal that he was destined never
to finish; only his History of Brazil, 3 vol.
(1810–19), was published. His edition (1817) of
Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Le Morte
Darthur played an important part in generating
renewed interest in the Middle Ages during the
19th century.
In 1813 Southey was appointed poet laureate
through the influence of Sir Walter Scott. But
the unauthorized publication (1817) of Wat
Tyler, an early verse drama reflecting his
youthful political opinions, enabled his enemies
to remind the public of his youthful
republicanism. About this time he became
involved in a literary imbroglio with Lord
Byron. Byron had already attacked Southey in
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) and
had dedicated to him (1819) the first cantos of
Don Juan, a satire on hypocrisy. In his
introduction to A Vision of Judgement (1821),
Southey continued the quarrel by denouncing
Byron as belonging to a “Satanic school” of
poetry, and Byron replied by producing a
masterful parody of Southey’s own poem under the
title The Vision of Judgment (1822). The
historian Thomas Macaulay unleashed a similarly
devastating riposte to Southey’s Sir Thomas
More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and
Prospects of Society (1829), a major statement
of 19th-century political medievalism. Southey’s
last years were clouded by his wife’s insanity,
by family quarrels resulting from his second
marriage after her death (1837), and by his own
failing mental and physical health.
Except for a few lyrics, ballads, and
comic-grotesque poems—such as “My days among the
Dead are past,” “After Blenheim,” and “The
Inchcape Rock”—Southey’s poetry is little read
today, though his “English Eclogues” (1799)
anticipate Alfred Tennyson’s “English Idyls” as
lucid, relaxed, and observant verse accounts of
contemporary life. His prose style, however, has
been long regarded as masterly in its ease and
clarity. These qualities are best seen in his
Life of Nelson (1813), still a classic; in the
Life of Wesley; and the Rise and Progress of
Methodism (1820); in the lively Letters from
England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, the
observations of a fictitious Spaniard (1807);
and in the anonymously published The Doctor, 7
vol. (1834–47), a rambling miscellany packed
with comment, quotations, and anecdotes
(including the well-known children’s classic
“The Story of the Three Bears”). His less
successful epic poems are verse romances having
a mythological or legendary subject matter set
in the past and in distant places. In his prose
works and in his voluminous correspondence,
which gives a detailed picture of his literary
surroundings and friends, Southey’s effortless
mastery of prose is clearly evident, a fact
attested to by such eminent contemporaries as
William Hazlitt and Scott and even by such an
enemy as Byron.
