Southey, Robert

Southey, Robert (1774–1843), was expelled from Westminster School for originating a magazine, the Flagellant, a precocious essay against flogging, and proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford. He became friendly with S. T. Coleridge and together they planned their utopian Pantisocratic society. At Oxford, with Coleridge, he wrote The Fall of Robespierre. In 1795 he travelled to Portugal, married Elizabeth Fricker (Coleridge married her sister, Sara), and wrote Joan of Arc (1796). Between 1796 and 1798 he wrote many ballads, including ‘The Inchcape Rock’, ‘The Battle of Blenheim’, and ‘The Holy Tree’. In 1800 he went to Spain, and on his return settled in the Lake District where he remained for the rest of his life as one of the ‘Lake Poets’. A narrative Oriental verse romance, Thalaba the Destroyer, appeared in 1801, but sold poorly. In 1803 he published a translation of Amadis of Gaul (revised from an older version); in 1805, Madoc; and in 1807, the year in which he received a government pension, appeared a version of Palmerin of England. In 1808 he translated the Chronicle of the Cid and in 1809 began his long association with the Quarterly Review. The Curse of Kehama appeared in 1810 and Omniana, an original commonplace book, with contributions by Coleridge, in 1812. He was appointed in 1813 poet laureate, a post which he came greatly to dislike, and in the same year published his short but admirable Life of Nelson. A narrative poem Roderick; the Last of the Goths appeared in 1814. In 1817 he produced an edition of Malory and had to endure the publication, by his enemies, of his youthful and revolutionary Wat Tyler. The final volume of his History of Brazil (3 vols, 1810–19) appeared a year before his Life of Wesley. In 1821, to commemorate the death of George III, he wrote A Vision of Judgement, in the preface to which he vigorously attacked Byron, who replied in The Vision of Judgement. The Book of the Church appeared in 1824; A Tale of Paraguay in 1825; Sir Thomas More, in which he converses with the ghost of More, in 1829; All for Love; and The Pilgrim to Compostella in 1829; and in 1832 Essays Moral and Political and the last volume of History of the Peninsular War (1823–32). Between 1832 and 1837 he worked on a Life and an edition of Cowper, and on his Lives of the British Admirals (1833). His wife died in 1837, and in 1839 he married Caroline Bowles. The Doctor, etc. was begun in 1834 (7 vols, 1834–47). Southey's last years were marked by an increasing mental decline.

Many of his contemporaries, in particular Hazlitt and Byron, felt that in accepting pensions and the laureateship, and in retracting his youthful Jacobinism, Southey was betraying principles.