Robert Southey
Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death, he was initially a radical voice among the early Romantics, but grew increasingly conservative in later years. He first gained a reputation for political radicalism through his contributions to the Monthly Magazine in the 1790s, poems such as “Botany Bay Eclogues” (1794-98), and his interest in popular antiquities reflected in the many ballad imitations he published in the late 1790s. Southey also collaborated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the short-lived Pantisocracy scheme (1794), an ultimately failed plan to found a utopian community in North America. Concurrently, Southey’s engagement with mythological systems and orientalism shaped the content and style of his epic poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810). Thalaba, in particular, was harshly criticized by the Edinburgh Review (1802), where Francis Jeffrey lambasted Southey as the leader of a “sect of [poetic] dissenters”, including William Wordsworth and Coleridge, a group which later became known collectively as the Lake Poets.
After his early endorsement of revolutionary and anti-establishment ideals, Southey gradually aligned himself with Tory principles during the national emergency of the Napoleonic wars in the 1810s. This ideological shift won him establishment recognition, culminating in his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1813, but also drew fierce criticism, particularly from younger radical and proto-liberal intellectuals. Percy Bysshe Shelley, who visited him between late 1811 and early 1812, was disappointed by Southey’s ‘tergiversation’ and conservative positions over parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation and the Irish question. Also Leigh Hunt, once an admirer, turned against Southey after his political conversion. In The Examiner, Hunt published scathing satirical pieces such as “Death and Funeral of the Late Mr. Southey” (13 April 1817) and “Extraordinary Case of the Late Mr. Southey” (11 May 1817), where he portrays the Laureate as the worst of literary-political turncoats. These attacks were connected with the pirated publication, in 1817, of Southey’s early radical play Wat Tyler, which further fuelled public accusations of apostasy. In the same year, Thomas Love Peacock sent Southey up in the character of Mr. Feathernest in his satirical novel Melincourt (1817), and William Hazlitt discussed the question of apostasy in his chapter on Southey in The Spirit of the Age (1825).
Southey became a particular target of Lord Byron, who ridiculed him in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), even though he also admittedly admired some of his works such as Roderick the Last of the Goths (1814). Byron’s animosity deepened after he became convinced that Southey had spread rumors of a ‘league of incest’ formed at Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva, in the summer of 1816, involving himself, Percy and Mary Shelley, and her half-sister Claire Clairmont. Southey’s preface to A Vision of Judgment (1821), in which he condemned the so-called ‘Satanic school’ of poets, prompted Byron to respond with his parody The Vision of Judgment, eventually published in The Liberal. Byron voiced his satirical attacks on Southey and the other Lake Poets also in Don Juan (1819-24), both in the unpublished Dedication and several places in the poem, most notably in canto III through the character of the ‘sad trimmer’ who sings the lyric “The Isles of Greece.”
Detested by radicals and liberals, Southey was a respected figure in conservative literary and intellectual circles, especially thanks to his prose writings, such as The Life of Nelson (1813), The History of Brazil (1810-1819), and The History of the Peninsular War (1823-32). He was also a frequent contributor to the Quarterly Review and other Tory periodicals, positioning himself as a defender of moral and national values, while also denouncing such rapidly expanding phenomena as unchecked industrialization and capitalist economy, as well as advocating policies to counteract their negative social impact. Southey had already examined these issues in his popular Letters from England (1807) and would do so again in his exploration of the nation’s condition in Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829). Later in life he published his most experimental work, the multi-volume The Doctor (1834-47), a mixture of fiction and autobiography, with a variety of heterogeneous interpolations such as, most famously, the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears. Mindful of the judgment of posterity and the future reception of his poetic corpus, he prepared the ten-volume edition of his poems published in 1837-38 with the title of The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself. His last years were afflicted by mental decline and, after his death in 1843, William Wordsworth succeeded him as the new Poet Laureate.
(Diego Saglia)
Ultimo aggiornamento
28.07.2025