Frequently grouped as a Lake poet along with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey never enjoyed the reputation of his exceptional peers, but he was a significant influence on the second‐generation Romantic poets (as is brought out in the section on him under ‘Readings’), despite their hostility to his later politics and personal, poetic, and political attacks on their work. Shelley, in particular, rapturously received Southey’s epics, especially his The Curse of Kehama and Thalaba the Destroyer, with echoes of and allusions to them spanning his career. Known as a poet and prominent reviewer, Southey was born in Bristol to a genteel mother and a merchant father. His maternal aunt, Elizabeth Tyler, took pains to insulate him from what she perceived to be the less salubrious influences of his childhood, but she imbued him with a love of the theatre that would persist throughout his life. Despite unhappy experiences at school, when he entered Westminster School in 1788, Southey made some enduring friendships and wrote precocious poetry influenced by Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. He was expelled from Westminster for his subversive views and his expulsion, combined with his father’s bankruptcy and death in 1792, left him in a despairing state. At Balliol College, Oxford, he began his epic, Joan of Arc. Initially drawn to medicine, Southey was horrified by the realities of the operating theatre, and his radical political views barred him from government work. On meeting the Bristol seamstress Edith Fricker, Southey fell in love with her, and he began to consider emigration as a way out of his difficulties, a course of action galvanized by meeting Coleridge in 1794. Together they contemplated setting up a pantisocratic community in America, and Coleridge married Edith’s sister, Sara. The pantisocratic scheme came to nothing, and Southey married Edith in 1795 before moving to Lisbon, Portugal, leaving his new wife with the bookseller Joseph Cottle, a longtime supporter of both Southey and Coleridge. His stay in Portugal (and Spain) proved fertile for his writing, and he produced Letters Written during a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797) to modest success.
Pleased by the favourable notices of Joan of Arc, Southey began work on his epic projects, Madoc and Thalaba the Destroyer, before straitened financial circumstances and ill health forced him and his wife to move to Portugal. Returning after over a year in 1801, Southey undertook translation work and began to write for the Annual Review, with the latter providing much needed financial support. Southey’s mother died in 1802, prompting the couple’s return to Bristol, but following the death of his daughter, Margaret, in her first year, Southey succumbed to Coleridge’s pressure to move to Keswick and live in Greta Hall. Despite Coleridge’s proximity to the Wordsworths, his increasingly troubled marriage led him to leave Keswick for Malta, leaving Southey to care for Coleridge’s wife and children along with his own. Southey continued writing, publishing Letters from England (1807) that drew on his Spanish and Portuguese knowledge, and Walter Savage Landor encouraged Southey to write The Curse of Kehama (1810) by offering to subsidize his epics.
Southey was growing increasingly conservative, and this burgeoning political perspective gained force from his well‐remunerated employment with the new journal, the Tory Quarterly Review. He became poet laureate in 1813, and took the opportunity to expound his conservative and nationalistic views, much to the amusement and fury of his political opponents. The pirated republication in 1817 of his early radical work Wat Tyler caused him serious embarrassment, despite his claim to be professing the same principles in favour of human progress as he had in his youth. However, to younger poets, such as Shelley and Byron (who had been attacked by Southey in the periodical press), Southey had become a symbol of fatuous poetry at the service of political oppression. When A Vision of Judgement (1821) was published, Byron lost no time in writing a magisterial parody, The Vision of Judgement (1822), that lampooned Southey’s patriotic and monarchist poem; references to Southey in Don Juan parade the loathing Byron felt for Southey’s ‘turn[ing] out a Tory’ (Don Juan, ‘Dedication’, 1.3). Southey’s later publications reveal a greater calm, with A Tale of Paraguay (1825), Colloquies of Society (1829), History of Brazil (1810–19), History of the Peninsular War (1823–32), Lives of the British Admirals (1833–7), and his final published poem, Oliver Newman: a New‐England Tale (1845), offering a quieter world‐view. After the death of his wife, Southey married Caroline Anne Bowles in 1839; he began to lose his faculties before dying on 21 March 1843.
Geoffrey Carnall, ‘Southey, Robert (1774–1843)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2011 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26056, accessed 6 September 2015]; Robert Southey (1774–1843): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26056.