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Southey, Robert, 1774-1843We have 6 books for this author.
Robert Southey (August 12, 1774 – March 21, 1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate. Although his fame tends to be eclipsed by that of his contemporaries and friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey's verse enjoys enduring popularity. Moreover, he was a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, historian and biographer. His biographies include the life and works of John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson. The latter has rarely been out of print since its publication in 1813 and was adapted for the screen in the 1926 British film, Nelson. He was also a renowned Portuguese and Spanish scholar, translating a number of works of those two countries into English and writing both a History of Brazil (part of his planned History of Portugal which was never completed) and a History of the Peninsular War. Perhaps his most enduring contribution to literary history is the immortal children's classic, The Story of the Three Bears, the original Goldilocks story. LifeHe was born in Bristol to Thomas Southey and Margaret Hill and educated at Westminster School (from which he was expelled for writing a magazine article condemning flogging) and Balliol College, Oxford (of his time at Oxford Southey was later to say "All I learnt was a little swimming ... and a little boating."). After experimenting with a writing partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he published his first collection of poems in 1794. The same year, he, Coleridge and a few others discussed setting up an idealistic community in America ("pantisocracy").
Later iterations of the plan moved the commune to Wales, but Southey was later the first of the group to reject the idea as unworkable. Southey's wife, Edith, was the sister of Coleridge's wife. The Southeys set up home at Greta Hall, Keswick, in the Lake District, living on a tiny income. From 1809, he contributed to the Quarterly Review, and had become so well-known by 1813 that he was appointed Poet Laureate after Sir Walter Scott refused the post. In 1819, through a mutual friend (John Rickman), Southey met leading civil engineer Thomas Telford and struck up a strong friendship. From mid-August to 1 October 1819, Southey accompanied Telford on an extensive tour of his engineering projects in the Scottish Highlands, keeping a diary of his observations. This was published posthumously in 1929 as Journal of a tour in Scotland in 1819. In 1838, Edith died and Southey married Caroline Anne Bowles, also a poet. Many of his poems are still read by British schoolchildren, the best-known being The Inchcape Rock,After Blenheim (possibly one of the earliest anti-war poems) and The Cataract of Lodore. Major works
Robert Southey
PoliticsAlthough originally a radical supporter of the French Revolution, Southey followed the trajectory of fellow Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, towards conservatism. Embraced by the Tory Establishment as Poet Laureate, and from 1807 in receipt of a yearly stipend from them, he vigorously supported the repressive Liverpool government. He argued against parliamentary reform ("the railroad to ruin with the Devil for driver"), blamed the Peterloo Massacre on the allegedly revolutionary "rabble" killed and injured by government troops, and opposed Catholic emancipation. In 1817 he privately proposed penal transportation for those guilty of "libel" or "sedition". He had in mind figures like Thomas Jonathan Wooler and William Hone, whose prosecution he urged. Such writers were guilty, he wrote in the Quarterly Review, 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 have dwelt in peace." (Wooler and Hone were acquitted, but the threats caused another target, William Cobbett, to emigrate to the United States.) Given his departure from radicalism, and his attempts to have former fellow travellers prosecuted, it is unsurprising that contemporaries who kept the faith attacked Southey. They saw him as a selling out for money and respectability. In his portrait of Southey in The Spirit of the Age William Hazlitt wrote: "He wooed Liberty as a youthful lover, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride; and he has since wedded with an elderly and not very reputable lady, called Legitimacy." He was often mocked for what were seen as sycophantic odes to the king, most notably in Byron's long ironic dedication of Don Juan to Southey. Trivia
See also
Further readingCurry, Kenneth (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (Columbia UP: New York and London, 1965) Dowden, Edward (ed.), The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles (Dublin and London, 1881) Low, Dennis, The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Madden, John Lionel, Robert Southey: the critical heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972) Pratt, Lynda, ed. Robert Southey, Poetical Works, 1793-1810, 5 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004) Southey, Charles Cuthbert (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (New York, 1855). Speck, W. A. Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters, (Yale University Press, 2006) External links
Notes
This biographical information was gathered from the Robert_Southey page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project. BooksChronicle of the CidThe Iliad of Homer Translated into English Blank Verse by William Cowper The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson Poems Poems, 1799 Sir Thomas More, or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society |
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