Robert Southey

Robert Southey (Bristol, 1774 – Keswick, 1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school and one of the so-called Lake Poets, alongside William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1813. Today he is remembered as much for his prose as for his verse: he was a prolific biographer, historian and translator, with a particular interest in Spain and Portugal.

Born into a family of cloth merchants, he was raised for much of his childhood by an aunt. At Westminster School in London he was expelled after writing an article, in a magazine he had started himself, that blamed the Devil for inventing flogging. At Balliol College, Oxford, he spent more time reading German and French literature than attending lectures, and he left without a degree. There he befriended Coleridge, and the two planned an idealistic community called “pantisocracy”, which never came into being. Both men married sisters, and in 1803 Southey settled in the Lake District.

As a young man he was an enthusiast for the French Revolution, but over the years he moved towards Tory conservatism, earning the scorn of former allies such as Hazlitt and Byron. Byron mocked him in the dedication of Don Juan and in The Vision of Judgment, a parody of Southey's own poem praising George III. Southey was not a simple reactionary, however: he criticised child labour in the factories and supported universal free education.

He wrote constantly, partly because he depended on commissions from publishers and from the Quarterly Review. His output included epics on exotic subjects, histories, travel books and translations from Spanish and Portuguese, among them Amadis of Gaul and the Chronicle of the Cid. His biographies of Nelson, Wesley, Cromwell and Bunyan remained in circulation long after his death. Even his rivals praised the clarity of his prose, and British schoolchildren still encounter his short poems, such as “After Blenheim”. He died in Keswick in 1843.