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Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters
In his lifetime Robert Southey was very much the equal of his fellow 'Lake poets', Coleridge and Wordsworth. But since his death his reputation has been overshadowed by their success. In this new biography W.A. Speck argues that if Southey's poetry is no longer considered as significant, his other writings were more salient and his political views far more influential than those of his fellow poets. He was, as Byron conceded, England's 'only existing entire man of letters'. The book engages with Southey's voluminous publications, weaving discussion of them into the narrative of his life. It shows how he moved from self-confessed republican and admirer of the French Revolution in the 1790s, to 'the most powerful literary supporter of the stories' by the 1820s. Speck has explored Southey's full correspondence, not simply that which appeared in the editions edited by his descendants. They reveal a man of considerably greater emotional complexity than previously assumed. Far from a happily married man, Southey sought intellectual and emotional fulfillment outside a tepid marriage, first from Mary Barker, and then from Caroline Bowles who became his second wife. The first fully rounded life for sixty years, Speck's account sets Southey in historical context and restores him to the map of English literature.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published May 30, 2006
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About the author
W.A. Speck
24 books3 followersWilliam Arthur Speck (born 1938) is a British historian specializing in late 17th and 18th-century British and American history.
Speck was educated at Bradford Grammar School and The Queen's College, Oxford, gaining a BA in 1960 and a D.Phil in 1966. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leeds and a Special Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham where he co-convenes an Interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar.
Speck was educated at Bradford Grammar School and The Queen's College, Oxford, gaining a BA in 1960 and a D.Phil in 1966. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leeds and a Special Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham where he co-convenes an Interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar.
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August 23, 2024
The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the poet and historian Robert Southey (12.8.1774– 21.3.1843) is unlikely to be the occasion of much celebration, such is the extent to which the former Poet Laureate has been forgotten.
I first came across Southey in my early teens, when I was reading Marvel comics, epic prose and poetry, heroic fantasy, and supernatural horror – a heady mix. My life-long love of medievalia led me to seek out his translation of "Amadis of Gaul," – a chivalric romance that even the worried friends of Don Quixote thought should be preserved from the flames – and I followed that up with his epic poems on mythological themes. Later, when I fell under the spell of his fellow Lake Poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, I realised that he never wrote anything that could compare to the inspired genius of their best work, but I always felt he deserved better than the oblivion into which he has largely fallen.
Southey’s reputation has been restored to some degree by W.A. Speck’s 2006 biography, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (2006) – which gives a good overview of his life and prodigious output (biographies, political journalism, poems, translations – even a rather bizarre novel introducing the story of the Three Bears!), and helps us to understand how his political views evolved from radical republicanism to arch-Toryism.
Brought up in Bristol, Southey went to Oxford University, where he became close friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Along with some other like-minded fellows, they dreamed of creating an ideal community in the New World – but “Pantisocracy,” as they rather unappealingly called it, turned out to be a utopian fantasy.
They might have had more chance to make a go of it if they had, as Southey suggested, gone to Wales instead; but it would be in his first epic poem, "Madoc" (1805), that the Wales-America connection would be explored – imaginatively, rather than literally. Escaping the internecine strife besetting his homeland in the twelfth century, Madoc (son of Owain, King of North Wales) leads his followers to the New World, settling in Aztlán (the ancestral home of the Aztecs), where they help to stamp out human sacrifice. Here, instead of Wales becoming a substitute for America for English republicans, America becomes the promised land of Welsh exiles, led by a prince who is on a couple of occasions compared with King Arthur.
Southey also visited William Blake, where he was shown his illuminated book "Jerusalem"; he considered it “a perfectly mad poem” and Blake himself to be “that painter of great but insane genius”. Southey was concerned that “religious enthusiasm” was “morbid” – his own Christian faith he considered to be “reasonable”. At the same time, he had a deep fascination with “superstition and legendary lore”, his understanding of non-Christian beliefs not dissimilar to that of Blake, that they are degraded expressions of a primordial revelation, the Eternal Gospel, though "Changed and corrupted in the course of time,/ And haply also by delusive art/ Of Evil Powers." It is this perspective which inspires his exploration of Islamic and Hindu mythology in his epic poems "Thalaba the Destroyer" (1801) and "The Curse of Kehama" (1810), in which the “delusive art of evil powers” is given full reign.
Although completed after "Madoc", "Thalaba" was published first. Written in an unusual style, unrhymed lines of varying length, it is an Arabian Nights fantasy about a young orphan who is destined to destroy a race of evil sorcerers.
"Thalaba" was much admired by the younger poet Shelley, who made a point of visiting Southey, who was by then living in the Lake District, along with Wordsworth, and looking after the opium-addicted Coleridge’s family. Southey was quite taken with his young admirer, whose radicalism reminded him of himself at that age. But Shelley was disgusted that Southey, who had supported the French Republic in the revolutionary wars, was now a firm supporter of the war against Napoleon; and was not impressed by Southey’s view that Shelley would think differently once he grew up. In the event, Shelley would drown before he reached thirty.
"Thalaba," was followed by "The Curse of Kehama," inspired by the mythology of Hinduism, which Southey considered, “of all religions” to be “the most monstrous in its fables and the most fatal in its effects”. While denigrating all religious beliefs other than his own as superstitions, Southey was fascinated by their exoticism – nowadays, the poem would be dubbed “The Curse of Orientalism”!
The last line of "Kehama" touches on a belief that Southey did not consider superstitious, but which touched him deeply and personally. When the hero passes on to the afterlife at the end of the poem, we are told: All whom he loved he met, to part no more. Southey in his own life tried to comfort himself from the grief of bereavement by burying himself in his books, “the friends whom there is no danger of losing...”
But the death of his son Herbert nearly broke him. As Southey’s biographer Speck writes: “Southey doted on his son to distraction, and his death was the cruellest blow he ever suffered. He bore his grief as a Christian stoic, clinging for comfort to the notion that he would see Herbert again in the next world. But his earthly happiness was shattered. ‘The joyousness of my disposition has received its death wound’, he confessed.” He tried to express his sorrow in verse, but could come up only with fragments.
Speck singles out as “one of the most remarkable in the whole of Southey’s massive poetic output” a passage in his last epic poem, "Roderick the Last of the Goths" (1814), in which he evokes another love, not that of a father for a son, but of a woman for a married man: "He was the sunshine of my soul, and like/ A flower, I lived and flourish’d in his light." Speck leaves us dangling with the possibility that Southey was inspired by the unrequited love of a female friend for the poet himself.
"Roderick" itself, the story of the last Visigothic Christian King of Spain’s resistance to the Moorish conquest, was an expression of yet another love: that of Southey for the Iberian Peninsula, both as visitor and as historian. It would inspire works such as his "History of the Peninsular Wars," a companion piece to what is probably his best-known prose work, the "Life of Nelson" (still enjoyable to read today), in which he writes movingly of the love of Lady Hamilton for the married Nelson. Its publication definitively marked his transformation from idealistic supporter of the French Revolution to patriotic supporter of the war against Bonaparte, then to outspoken opponent of democratic reforms which he believed would only lead to another Terror and another Bonaparte.
This new conservatism opened his way to being appointed Poet Laureate, and to merciless ribbing by Lord Byron. But Southey was not alone - his fellow Lake poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, radical republicans in their youth, both turned into staunch Tories as they got older. Coincidentally or not, they also stopped writing interesting poems.
Southey particularly inveighed on social issues at length, but his views were arguably more nuanced than his dogmatic delivery would suggest. He was no fan of laissez-faire capitalism, taking an interest in co-operatives and in Robert Owen’s socialist experiments, agreeing with him about the need for universal education and for the state to act to alleviate poverty and adverse social conditions (to prevent revolution). But he objected to the materialist Owen’s treating his employees, as Speck puts it, “as mere machines.” Idealism was no substitute for religion. At the same time, religion could be used to keep people in ignorance – as he saw during his travels in Spain and Portugal, where there were superstition and poverty amidst “a paradise of nature.”
Southey became fluent in the Iberian languages, leading him to attempt translations, notably of the "Chronicle of the Cid" and of "Amadis of Gaul," which he "reduced" into English (much as Sir Thomas Malory would do with the French Arthurian romances).
Southey’s translation of "Amadis," published in four volumes in 1803, was followed up by "Palmerin of England" in 1807; and ten years later, Southey collaborated on a new edition of Caxton’s version of Sir Thomas Malory’s "Morte Darthur." Entitled, more appropriately, "The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of Kyng Arthur," Southey provided a Preface and Notes for the text. Its main claim to fame now must be that it was read by, and inspired, not just the poets William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Alfred Tennyson, each of whom wrote Arthurian verses in consequence, but also the artist Edward Burne-Jones, who produced several works under its influence.
Moreover, some of Burne-Jones’ Arthurian paintings owe more to Southey than they do to Malory: For, in his Preface, Southey summarises and partially translates a French version of the magical entrapment of Merlin by the Lady of the Lake that is very different to Malory’s, but which has clearly influenced Burne-Jones’ portrayal of the episode in his oil painting "The Beguiling of Merlin" of 1874:
“At length it fell out that as they were going one day hand in hand through the forest of Broceliande, they found a bush of white thorn which was laden with flowers; and they seated themselves under the shade of this white thorn upon the green grass, and they disported together and took their solace, and Merlin laid his head upon the damsel's lap, and then she began to feel if he were asleep. Then the damsel rose and made a ring with her wimple round the bush and round Merlin, and began her enchantments such as he himself had taught her; and nine times she made the ring, and nine times she made the enchantment; and then she went and sate down by him, and placed his head again upon her lap; and when he awoke and looked round him, it seemed to him that he was inclosed in the strongest tower in the world, and laid upon a fair bed; then said he to the dame, My lady, you have deceived me unless you abide with me, for no one hath power to unmake this tower, save you alone. Fair friend, she replied, I shall often be here, and you shall hold me in your arms, and I will hold you in mine. And in this she held her covenant to him, for afterwards there was never night nor day in which she was not there.”
I find this passage particularly moving when thinking about Southey’s own ending. For twenty years after his edition of Malory was published, he continued working, primarily on biographies and histories. But his wife Edith succumbed to depression, and died in 1837, and Southey never really recovered from what he described as “long years of misery” – although he married again two years later, to an old friend, the poet Caroline Bowles. He felt that she, rather than Edith, was the wife of his bosom; they were “one heart and one will.”
Southey wrote an epithalamium for their marriage, in which he wrote "the Heart is wise;/ And happy they who thus in faith obey/ Their better nature; err sometimes they may/ And some sad thought lie heavy in the breast,/ Such as by hope deceived are left behind;/ But like a shadow these will pass away/ From the pure sunshine of the peaceful mind." Caroline also wrote an epithalamium, in which she said that she loved him for "his noble mind,/ (Divinely framed, divinely taught)."
As Speck comments: “It is a bitter irony that both should lay stress on his mind, for the shadows that were darkening it were not to be dispersed by sunshine.” Within a few months of the ceremony, he began to show signs of mental confusion, the beginnings of the dementia which would swiftly cloud his mind, leaving him unable to write. He would go into his library but, unable to work, he would just lovingly handle the volumes which had been such faithful companions over the years.
It is his books he is addressing in one of the best known of his lyrics, ‘My Days among the Dead are Past’: "Around me I behold,/ Where'er these casual eyes are cast,/ The mighty minds of old;/ My never-failing friends are they,/ With whom I converse day by day.// My thoughts are with the Dead, with them/ I live in long-past years// My hopes are with the Dead, anon/ My place with them will be,/ And I with them shall travel on/ Through all Futurity;/ Yet leaving here a name, I trust,/ That will not perish in the dust."
Southey died of a stroke on the spring equinox, 1843. He was buried in Crosthwaite Churchyard in Keswick, alongside his first wife Edith and the three children who predeceased him. Thanks to scholars such as Speck, his name has not perished in the dust; but I like to think that his withdrawal into silence at the end of his life was a beguiling, like that of Merlin, into that poetic otherworld of romance which always held an allure for him, but which the duties of the everyday world obliged him to keep at a distance.
The Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, who died a hundred years after Southey, once wrote that, in abandoning himself to the spells of the Lady of the Lake, “Merlin rises to the calm heights of an Indian god who withdraws, after a period of manifestation, back into his own silence, knowing that he has no further part to play in saving or judging the world.” Such also, perhaps, was the ultimate fate of Robert Southey.
There is more on literature and mythology in my blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter)
I first came across Southey in my early teens, when I was reading Marvel comics, epic prose and poetry, heroic fantasy, and supernatural horror – a heady mix. My life-long love of medievalia led me to seek out his translation of "Amadis of Gaul," – a chivalric romance that even the worried friends of Don Quixote thought should be preserved from the flames – and I followed that up with his epic poems on mythological themes. Later, when I fell under the spell of his fellow Lake Poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, I realised that he never wrote anything that could compare to the inspired genius of their best work, but I always felt he deserved better than the oblivion into which he has largely fallen.
Southey’s reputation has been restored to some degree by W.A. Speck’s 2006 biography, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (2006) – which gives a good overview of his life and prodigious output (biographies, political journalism, poems, translations – even a rather bizarre novel introducing the story of the Three Bears!), and helps us to understand how his political views evolved from radical republicanism to arch-Toryism.
Brought up in Bristol, Southey went to Oxford University, where he became close friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Along with some other like-minded fellows, they dreamed of creating an ideal community in the New World – but “Pantisocracy,” as they rather unappealingly called it, turned out to be a utopian fantasy.
They might have had more chance to make a go of it if they had, as Southey suggested, gone to Wales instead; but it would be in his first epic poem, "Madoc" (1805), that the Wales-America connection would be explored – imaginatively, rather than literally. Escaping the internecine strife besetting his homeland in the twelfth century, Madoc (son of Owain, King of North Wales) leads his followers to the New World, settling in Aztlán (the ancestral home of the Aztecs), where they help to stamp out human sacrifice. Here, instead of Wales becoming a substitute for America for English republicans, America becomes the promised land of Welsh exiles, led by a prince who is on a couple of occasions compared with King Arthur.
Southey also visited William Blake, where he was shown his illuminated book "Jerusalem"; he considered it “a perfectly mad poem” and Blake himself to be “that painter of great but insane genius”. Southey was concerned that “religious enthusiasm” was “morbid” – his own Christian faith he considered to be “reasonable”. At the same time, he had a deep fascination with “superstition and legendary lore”, his understanding of non-Christian beliefs not dissimilar to that of Blake, that they are degraded expressions of a primordial revelation, the Eternal Gospel, though "Changed and corrupted in the course of time,/ And haply also by delusive art/ Of Evil Powers." It is this perspective which inspires his exploration of Islamic and Hindu mythology in his epic poems "Thalaba the Destroyer" (1801) and "The Curse of Kehama" (1810), in which the “delusive art of evil powers” is given full reign.
Although completed after "Madoc", "Thalaba" was published first. Written in an unusual style, unrhymed lines of varying length, it is an Arabian Nights fantasy about a young orphan who is destined to destroy a race of evil sorcerers.
"Thalaba" was much admired by the younger poet Shelley, who made a point of visiting Southey, who was by then living in the Lake District, along with Wordsworth, and looking after the opium-addicted Coleridge’s family. Southey was quite taken with his young admirer, whose radicalism reminded him of himself at that age. But Shelley was disgusted that Southey, who had supported the French Republic in the revolutionary wars, was now a firm supporter of the war against Napoleon; and was not impressed by Southey’s view that Shelley would think differently once he grew up. In the event, Shelley would drown before he reached thirty.
"Thalaba," was followed by "The Curse of Kehama," inspired by the mythology of Hinduism, which Southey considered, “of all religions” to be “the most monstrous in its fables and the most fatal in its effects”. While denigrating all religious beliefs other than his own as superstitions, Southey was fascinated by their exoticism – nowadays, the poem would be dubbed “The Curse of Orientalism”!
The last line of "Kehama" touches on a belief that Southey did not consider superstitious, but which touched him deeply and personally. When the hero passes on to the afterlife at the end of the poem, we are told: All whom he loved he met, to part no more. Southey in his own life tried to comfort himself from the grief of bereavement by burying himself in his books, “the friends whom there is no danger of losing...”
But the death of his son Herbert nearly broke him. As Southey’s biographer Speck writes: “Southey doted on his son to distraction, and his death was the cruellest blow he ever suffered. He bore his grief as a Christian stoic, clinging for comfort to the notion that he would see Herbert again in the next world. But his earthly happiness was shattered. ‘The joyousness of my disposition has received its death wound’, he confessed.” He tried to express his sorrow in verse, but could come up only with fragments.
Speck singles out as “one of the most remarkable in the whole of Southey’s massive poetic output” a passage in his last epic poem, "Roderick the Last of the Goths" (1814), in which he evokes another love, not that of a father for a son, but of a woman for a married man: "He was the sunshine of my soul, and like/ A flower, I lived and flourish’d in his light." Speck leaves us dangling with the possibility that Southey was inspired by the unrequited love of a female friend for the poet himself.
"Roderick" itself, the story of the last Visigothic Christian King of Spain’s resistance to the Moorish conquest, was an expression of yet another love: that of Southey for the Iberian Peninsula, both as visitor and as historian. It would inspire works such as his "History of the Peninsular Wars," a companion piece to what is probably his best-known prose work, the "Life of Nelson" (still enjoyable to read today), in which he writes movingly of the love of Lady Hamilton for the married Nelson. Its publication definitively marked his transformation from idealistic supporter of the French Revolution to patriotic supporter of the war against Bonaparte, then to outspoken opponent of democratic reforms which he believed would only lead to another Terror and another Bonaparte.
This new conservatism opened his way to being appointed Poet Laureate, and to merciless ribbing by Lord Byron. But Southey was not alone - his fellow Lake poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, radical republicans in their youth, both turned into staunch Tories as they got older. Coincidentally or not, they also stopped writing interesting poems.
Southey particularly inveighed on social issues at length, but his views were arguably more nuanced than his dogmatic delivery would suggest. He was no fan of laissez-faire capitalism, taking an interest in co-operatives and in Robert Owen’s socialist experiments, agreeing with him about the need for universal education and for the state to act to alleviate poverty and adverse social conditions (to prevent revolution). But he objected to the materialist Owen’s treating his employees, as Speck puts it, “as mere machines.” Idealism was no substitute for religion. At the same time, religion could be used to keep people in ignorance – as he saw during his travels in Spain and Portugal, where there were superstition and poverty amidst “a paradise of nature.”
Southey became fluent in the Iberian languages, leading him to attempt translations, notably of the "Chronicle of the Cid" and of "Amadis of Gaul," which he "reduced" into English (much as Sir Thomas Malory would do with the French Arthurian romances).
Southey’s translation of "Amadis," published in four volumes in 1803, was followed up by "Palmerin of England" in 1807; and ten years later, Southey collaborated on a new edition of Caxton’s version of Sir Thomas Malory’s "Morte Darthur." Entitled, more appropriately, "The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of Kyng Arthur," Southey provided a Preface and Notes for the text. Its main claim to fame now must be that it was read by, and inspired, not just the poets William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Alfred Tennyson, each of whom wrote Arthurian verses in consequence, but also the artist Edward Burne-Jones, who produced several works under its influence.
Moreover, some of Burne-Jones’ Arthurian paintings owe more to Southey than they do to Malory: For, in his Preface, Southey summarises and partially translates a French version of the magical entrapment of Merlin by the Lady of the Lake that is very different to Malory’s, but which has clearly influenced Burne-Jones’ portrayal of the episode in his oil painting "The Beguiling of Merlin" of 1874:
“At length it fell out that as they were going one day hand in hand through the forest of Broceliande, they found a bush of white thorn which was laden with flowers; and they seated themselves under the shade of this white thorn upon the green grass, and they disported together and took their solace, and Merlin laid his head upon the damsel's lap, and then she began to feel if he were asleep. Then the damsel rose and made a ring with her wimple round the bush and round Merlin, and began her enchantments such as he himself had taught her; and nine times she made the ring, and nine times she made the enchantment; and then she went and sate down by him, and placed his head again upon her lap; and when he awoke and looked round him, it seemed to him that he was inclosed in the strongest tower in the world, and laid upon a fair bed; then said he to the dame, My lady, you have deceived me unless you abide with me, for no one hath power to unmake this tower, save you alone. Fair friend, she replied, I shall often be here, and you shall hold me in your arms, and I will hold you in mine. And in this she held her covenant to him, for afterwards there was never night nor day in which she was not there.”
I find this passage particularly moving when thinking about Southey’s own ending. For twenty years after his edition of Malory was published, he continued working, primarily on biographies and histories. But his wife Edith succumbed to depression, and died in 1837, and Southey never really recovered from what he described as “long years of misery” – although he married again two years later, to an old friend, the poet Caroline Bowles. He felt that she, rather than Edith, was the wife of his bosom; they were “one heart and one will.”
Southey wrote an epithalamium for their marriage, in which he wrote "the Heart is wise;/ And happy they who thus in faith obey/ Their better nature; err sometimes they may/ And some sad thought lie heavy in the breast,/ Such as by hope deceived are left behind;/ But like a shadow these will pass away/ From the pure sunshine of the peaceful mind." Caroline also wrote an epithalamium, in which she said that she loved him for "his noble mind,/ (Divinely framed, divinely taught)."
As Speck comments: “It is a bitter irony that both should lay stress on his mind, for the shadows that were darkening it were not to be dispersed by sunshine.” Within a few months of the ceremony, he began to show signs of mental confusion, the beginnings of the dementia which would swiftly cloud his mind, leaving him unable to write. He would go into his library but, unable to work, he would just lovingly handle the volumes which had been such faithful companions over the years.
It is his books he is addressing in one of the best known of his lyrics, ‘My Days among the Dead are Past’: "Around me I behold,/ Where'er these casual eyes are cast,/ The mighty minds of old;/ My never-failing friends are they,/ With whom I converse day by day.// My thoughts are with the Dead, with them/ I live in long-past years// My hopes are with the Dead, anon/ My place with them will be,/ And I with them shall travel on/ Through all Futurity;/ Yet leaving here a name, I trust,/ That will not perish in the dust."
Southey died of a stroke on the spring equinox, 1843. He was buried in Crosthwaite Churchyard in Keswick, alongside his first wife Edith and the three children who predeceased him. Thanks to scholars such as Speck, his name has not perished in the dust; but I like to think that his withdrawal into silence at the end of his life was a beguiling, like that of Merlin, into that poetic otherworld of romance which always held an allure for him, but which the duties of the everyday world obliged him to keep at a distance.
The Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, who died a hundred years after Southey, once wrote that, in abandoning himself to the spells of the Lady of the Lake, “Merlin rises to the calm heights of an Indian god who withdraws, after a period of manifestation, back into his own silence, knowing that he has no further part to play in saving or judging the world.” Such also, perhaps, was the ultimate fate of Robert Southey.
There is more on literature and mythology in my blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter)
December 10, 2020
How should one consider Robert Southey. A poet who lived in the Lake District, rather than one of the Lake Poets? A writer with an ability to produce inspirational work, or a hack who would churn out almost anything to make a living? In this biography the author tends to point towards a hard-working journalistic hack and sometime poet who chose to live in Keswick.
I have to admit that I have never read any of Southey's works, which makes me the wrong person to form any judgement on his literary talent. However, on the basis of Professor Speck's account one does see a young man pressured to see himself as part of the British gentry yet from a family a little short of cash. Intelligent – certainly; erudite – certainly; politically – excitable and radical when young, a stalwart conservative in later years (when he had accumulated an income and social position worth conserving); witty – well, playfully humorous with his children, otherwise too prolix by nature to tell a decent joke. He was a man who needed to be married and probably wanted lots of children. If only he could maintain a steady income from the one thing he was good at: writing.
From this biography I have to feel sorry for his wife, Edith. She is brought across as a figure consigned to the background, looking after Southey, looking after the house, looking after anyone Southey cared for or took pity on, producing babies at frequent intervals. Apart from the babies she seems more a housekeeper than a wife. Even with their final illnesses, probably forms of dementia or Alzheimer's struck them both, the author reduces Edith to a shadowy and quite lonely figure quietly declining despite Southey's best efforts, while Robert ends being visited and mourned as a significant loss to local as well as literary society by a wide circle of friends and relations for several years before he bows out.
This is a well written and thoughtful biography of a man I ended feeling that he is now as well known as he deserved to be: in the shadow of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron, yet Poet Laureate and probably aware that becoming a part of the political Establishment through and through had a lot to do with his elevated position.
I have to admit that I have never read any of Southey's works, which makes me the wrong person to form any judgement on his literary talent. However, on the basis of Professor Speck's account one does see a young man pressured to see himself as part of the British gentry yet from a family a little short of cash. Intelligent – certainly; erudite – certainly; politically – excitable and radical when young, a stalwart conservative in later years (when he had accumulated an income and social position worth conserving); witty – well, playfully humorous with his children, otherwise too prolix by nature to tell a decent joke. He was a man who needed to be married and probably wanted lots of children. If only he could maintain a steady income from the one thing he was good at: writing.
From this biography I have to feel sorry for his wife, Edith. She is brought across as a figure consigned to the background, looking after Southey, looking after the house, looking after anyone Southey cared for or took pity on, producing babies at frequent intervals. Apart from the babies she seems more a housekeeper than a wife. Even with their final illnesses, probably forms of dementia or Alzheimer's struck them both, the author reduces Edith to a shadowy and quite lonely figure quietly declining despite Southey's best efforts, while Robert ends being visited and mourned as a significant loss to local as well as literary society by a wide circle of friends and relations for several years before he bows out.
This is a well written and thoughtful biography of a man I ended feeling that he is now as well known as he deserved to be: in the shadow of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron, yet Poet Laureate and probably aware that becoming a part of the political Establishment through and through had a lot to do with his elevated position.
January 7, 2014
This is a very well researched and very well written book. If I give it four stars instead of five it it because the life of Southey isn't that riveting - except for his later years. It is is wonderful to read a book that has been so thoroughly researched and which contains such comprehensive notes. I've read it twice.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews