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Robert Southey

English romantic poet (1774–1843)

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  • 5 chapters

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Through Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Life

Robert Southey was born in Wine Street, Bristol, to Robert Southey and Margaret Hill. He was educated at Westminster School, London (where he was expelled for writing an article in The Flagellant, a magazine he originated, attributing the invention of flogging to the Devil), and at Balliol College, Oxford.

Southey went to Oxford with "a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon". He later said of Oxford, "All I learnt was a little swimming... and a little boating". He did, however, write a play, Wat Tyler (which, in 1817, after he became Poet Laureate, was published, to embarrass him, by his enemies). Experimenting with a writing partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, most notably in their joint composition of The Fall of Robespierre, Southey published his first collection of poems in 1794. The same year, Southey, Coleridge, Robert Lovell and several others discussed creating an idealistic community ("pantisocracy") on the banks of the Susquehanna River in America.

In 1795 he married Edith Fricker, whose sister Sara married Coleridge. The same year, he travelled to Portugal, and wrote Joan of Arc, published in 1796. He then wrote many ballads, went to Spain in 1800, and on his return settled in the Lake District.

In 1799, Southey and Coleridge were involved with early experiments with nitrous oxide (laughing gas), conducted by the Cornish scientist Humphry Davy.

While writing prodigiously, he received a government pension in 1807, and in 1809 started a long association with the Quarterly Review, which provided almost his only income for most of his life. He was appointed laureate in 1813, a post he came greatly to dislike.

In 1819 Southey accompanied the Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford, whom Southey nicknamed the “Colossus of Roads” on a tour of inspection of Telford’s works in Scotland. These included the Caledonian Canal (which would open three years later) and a number of Telford's roads, bridges, and harbour works. Southey’s account of the tour, Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, gives detailed descriptions of Telford’s engineering projects and records Southey’s own impressions of the Scottish landscape and people.

In 1821, Southey wrote A Vision of Judgment, to commemorate George III, in the preface to which he attacked Byron who, as well as responding with a parody, The Vision of Judgment (see below), mocked him frequently in Don Juan.

In 1837, Edith died, and Southey remarried, to Caroline Anne Bowles, also a poet, on 4 June 1839. The marriage broke down, not least because of his increasing dementia. His mind was giving way when he wrote a last letter to his friend Walter Savage Landor in 1839, but he continued to mention Landor's name when generally incapable of mentioning anyone. He died on 21 March 1843 and was buried in the churchyard of Crosthwaite Church, Keswick, where he had worshipped for forty years. There is a memorial to him inside the church, with an epitaph written by his friend William Wordsworth.

Southey was also a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, essay writer, historian and biographer. His biographies include the life and works of John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson. The last has rarely been out of print since its publication in 1813 and was adapted as the 1926 British film Nelson.

He was a generous man, particularly kind to Coleridge's abandoned family, but he incurred the enmity of many, including Hazlitt as well as Byron, who felt he had betrayed his principles in accepting pensions and the laureateship, and in retracting his youthful ideals.

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