Robert Southey

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Standard Name: Southey, Robert
Robert Southey was a Romantic poet, one of the Lake Poets with Wordsworth and Coleridge . In addition to epics, ballads, and other verse, he penned several plays and contributed regularly to the ToryQuarterly Review. His prose works, for which he was celebrated during his lifetime, were primarily historical, ecclesiastical,and biographical, in addition to travel writing. He also produced translations (from French and Spanish), editions, and anthologies. He enjoyed an excellent reputation in his day, and for his last thirty years of life served as Poet Laureate.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Joanna Baillie
She met Wordsworth and Southey in the Lake District in 1808, and was corresponding with Wordsworth by 1812.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
1: 240
Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. Archon Books.
23
He named her his ideal English [sic] gentlewoman.
Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. Archon Books.
57
It was about the same...
Textual Production Joanna Baillie
Here she gathered together poems by such writers as Walter Scott , George Crabbe , William Wordsworth , Robert Southey , Felicia Hemans (whose work Baillie warmly admired), Anne Grant of Laggan, Anna Maria Porter
Friends, Associates Anna Letitia Barbauld
Her biographer William McCarthy, speculating on causes for this reversal of former admiration, mentions Coleridge's painful feelings for his mother and his wife, his leaving the Dissenters for the Church of England, and the predominance...
Violence Anna Letitia Barbauld
These young men joked together about inflicting physical violence on ALB : Coleridge vowed to cut her to the Heart; Southey wrote that Lamb ought to set fire to her wig (a fictional object...
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
J. W. Croker 's notice in the Quarterly Review (in June 1812, wrongly attributed by some to Southey ) was most offensive of all. He reached for the gendered weapons so often drawn against Mary Wollstonecraft
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB was a presence in the early poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge , though they later distanced themselves from her so emphatically. Her work appeared in magazines in the USA before the end of the...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Matilda Betham
The work she refers to as her source is Gervais de La Rue 's Dissertation on the Life and Writings of Mary, an Anglo-Norman Poetess of the 13th century, translated into English under the...
Education Mary Matilda Betham
More important than his teaching were her own efforts in a congenial atmosphere. The family would read aloud from poems and plays, providing their own appreciation and criticism. In her diary she wrote: In our...
Friends, Associates Mary Matilda Betham
As well as meeting at Llangollen with Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby (who later talked with high praise of her),
Betham, Ernest, editor. A House of Letters. Jarrold and Sons.
69, 70
MMB acquired a wide acquaintance in London. She became a close friend...
Health Mary Matilda Betham
MMB had some kind of general breakdown of health whose beginning Ernest Betham dates to about 1818 (though she seems to have been well when her Vignettes: in Verse appeared this year). Robert Southey reported...
Textual Production Mary Matilda Betham
In March 1799 MMB was apparently working both at some translation (which she suspected would not sell) and a novel. Neither has been identified or is known to have been printed.
Betham, Ernest, editor. A House of Letters. Jarrold and Sons.
61-2
In 1810 Southey
Literary responses Mary Matilda Betham
MMB said that this book received flattering praises in reviews.
Betham, Mary Matilda. “Preface”. Crow-Quill Flights.
7
It also brought compliments of some distinguished persons and two tributary effusions from writers from profession: Mr J. (apparently Edward Jerningham ) and...
Literary responses Mary Matilda Betham
Robert Southey wrote to MMB that this volume contains so much of what is really good that I hope the same powers will one day be employed upon something of greater extent.
Betham, Ernest, editor. A House of Letters. Jarrold and Sons.
104
The Critical...
Publishing Caroline Bowles
She sent the manuscript to Robert Southey , hoping the Poet Laureate would provide some instruction or advice on publication. He tried to secure Bowles a publisher but the one he tried first, John Murray
Publishing Caroline Bowles
Most of the contents had first appeared in Blackwood's.
Hickok, Kathleen. “’Burst Are the Prison Bars’: Caroline Bowles Southey and the Vicissitudes of Poetic Reputation”. Romanticism and Women Poets, edited by Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt, University Press of Kentucky, pp. 192-13.
200
Virginia Blain notes that Bowles entered into strenuous pre-publication negotiations with William Blackwood when she refused to accept all his editorial suggestions.
Blain, Virginia. “Anonymity and the Discourse of Amateurism: Caroline Bowles Southey Negotiates Blackwoods 1820-1847”. Victorian Journalism, edited by Barbara Garlick and Margaret Harris, Queensland University Press, pp. 1-18.
7
A...

Timeline

: One of the best-known poems of John Skelton,...

Writing climate item

Autumn1498

One of the best-known poems of John Skelton , The Bowge of Courte, probably dates from this season. It was printed by Wynkyn de Worde the following year.

By 18 September 1794: By this date Coleridge claimed to have written...

Writing climate item

By 18 September 1794

By this date Coleridge claimed to have written one of the two sonnets attributed to him this year about the scheme for establishing Pantisocracy (a utopian community) in America.

By June 1796: Samuel Taylor Coleridge compiled a booklet...

Writing climate item

By June 1796

Samuel Taylor Coleridge compiled a booklet titled Sonnets from Various Authors: four each by himself, Southey , Charles Lamb , and Charles Lloyd , two by Charlotte Smith , and one each by seven more writers including Anna Seward .

1798: Thomas Robert Malthus anonymously published...

Building item

1798

Thomas Robert Malthus anonymously published in LondonAn Essay on the Principle of Population, which later attached his name to the birth control movement.

June 1816: Lady Isabella King opened at Bailbrook House...

Building item

June 1816

Lady Isabella King opened at Bailbrook House near Bath a communal home for single gentlewomen (or Protestant nunnery): a project going back to Mary Astell , which King picked up from Sarah Scott 's Millenium Hall.

May 1819, May 1820: These months were scheduled for the removal...

National or international item

May 1819, May 1820

These months were scheduled for the removal of thousands of subsistence farmers and their families from the Highland estates of Lord and Lady Stafford (later the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland ) in the Sutherland...

October 1822: Byron published The Vision of Judgment (written...

Writing climate item

October 1822

Byron published The Vision of Judgment (written around the previous summer) in The Liberal, a journal which he and Leigh Hunt briefly published at Pisa.

January 1823: Charles Lamb published the first volume of...

Writing climate item

January 1823

Charles Lamb published the first volume of his Essays of Elia, which had been appearing regularly since August 1820 in the London Magazine.

May 1837: Thomas Noon Talfourd, MP for Reading, author,...

Writing climate item

May 1837

Thomas Noon Talfourd , MP for Reading, author, and friend of the literati, began his campaign to extend the length of copyright.

Texts

Southey, Robert. A Vision of Judgement. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821.
Southey, Robert. History of Brazil. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1819.
Southey, Robert, and Caroline Bowles. “Introduction”. The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, edited by Edward Dowden, Hodges, Figgis, 1881, p. vi - xxxii.
Southey, Robert, and John Jones. “Introduction, with Observations on Uneducated Poets”. Attempts in Verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant, John Murray, 1831.
Southey, Robert. Joan of Arc. Printed by Bulgin and Rosser, for Joseph Cottle, 1796.
Southey, Robert. Madoc. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805.
Southey, Robert, and Caroline Bowles. Robin Hood, A Fragment. W. Blackwood and Sons, 1847.
Southey, Robert. Roderick, the Last of the Goths. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814.
Southey, Robert, editor. Specimens of the Later English Poets. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807.
Southey, Robert. Thalaba the Destroyer. T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1801.
Southey, Robert, and Caroline Bowles. The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles. Editor Dowden, Edward, Hodges, Figgis, 1881.
Southey, Robert. The Curse of Kehama. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1810.
Southey, Robert. The Life of Nelson. John Murray, 1813.
Southey, Robert, and Charles Cuthbert Southey. The Life of the Rev. Andrew Bell. Editor Bowles, Caroline, J. Murray, 1844.
Southey, Robert. Wat Tyler. Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1817.