SOUTHEY, ROBERT

born Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng. died March 21, 1843, Keswick, Cumberland English poet and writer of miscellaneous prose who is chiefly remembered for his association with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the early Romantic movement. The son of a linen draper, Southey spent much of his childhood at Bath in the care of his aunt, Elizabeth Tyler. He began to write while attending Westminster School in London, from which he was expelled for criticizing in a school magazine the practice of excessive whipping. His expulsion roused the rebellious side of his nature and confirmed his enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution. When he entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1792, soon after his father's bankruptcy and death, Southey expressed his ardent sympathy for the revolution in the long poem Joan of Arc (published 1796). He first met Coleridge, who shared his views, in 1794, and together they wrote a verse drama, The Fall of Robespierre (1794). After leaving Oxford without a degree, Southey planned to carry out Coleridge's project for a pantisocracy, or utopian agricultural community, to be located on the banks of the Susquehanna River, in the United States. But his interest in pantisocracy faded, causing a temporary breach with Coleridge. In 1795 he secretly married Edith Fricker, whose sister, Sara, Coleridge was soon to marry. Southey's marriage created an irreparable breach between himself and his aunt, and late in 1795 he went to Portugal with his uncle, who was the British chaplain in Lisbon. While in Portugal he wrote the letters published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797), studied the literature of those two countries, and learned to thank God an Englishman. So began the change from revolutionary to Tory. He also began to study law but found himself unsuited for it. In 1797 he began to receive an annuity of 160 that was paid to him for nine years by an old Westminster school friend, Charles Wynn. In 179799 he published a second volume of his collected Poems. Southey by this time had decided to earn his living as a writer. In these years he composed many of his best short poems and ballads, and he became a regular contributor to newspapers and reviews. Southey also did translations, edited the works of Thomas Chatterton, and worked on the epic poem Madoc (1805) and completed the epic Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). In 1803 the Southeys visited the Coleridges, then living at Greta Hall, Keswick. The Southeys remained at Greta Hall for life, partly so that Sara and Edith could be together. Southey's friendship with Wordsworth, then at nearby Grasmere, dates from this time. The Southeys had seven children of their own, and, after Coleridge left his family for Malta, the whole household was economically dependent on Southey for a time. He was forced to produce unremittinglypoetry, criticism, history, biography, journalism, translations, and editions of earlier writers. During 180938 he wrote, for the Tory Quarterly Review, 95 political articles, for each of which he received 100. Of most interest today are those articles urging the state provision of social services. He also worked on a projected history of Portugal that he was destined never to finish; only his History of Brazil, 3 vol. (181019), was published. In 1813 Southey was appointed poet laureate through the influence of Sir Walter Scott, and in 1835 his government pension of 160, which had been secured for him by Wynn in 1807, was increased to 300 in recognition of his services to literature. He thus gained economic security, but the unauthorized publication (1817) of Wat Tyler, an early verse drama reflecting his youthful political opinions, enabled his enemies to remind the public of his youthful republicanism. About this time he became involved in a literary imbroglio with Lord Byron, who disliked him. Byron had already attacked Southey in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) and had dedicated to him (1819) the first cantos of Don Juan, a satire on hypocrisy. In his introduction to A Vision of Judgement (1821), Southey continued the quarrel by denouncing Byron as belonging to a Satanic school of poetry, and Byron replied by producing a masterful parody of Southey's own poem under the title The Vision of Judgment (1822). Southey's last years were clouded by his wife's insanity, by family quarrels resulting from his second marriage after her death (1837), and by his own failing mental and physical health. Except for a few lyrics, ballads, and comic-grotesque poemse.g., My days among the Dead are past, After Blenheim, and The Inchcape Rock (considered a masterpiece of comic invention)Southey's poetry is little read, but his prose style has been long regarded as masterly in its ease and clarity. These qualities are best seen in his Life of Nelson (1813), still a classic; in the Life of Wesley; and the Rise and Progress of Methodism (1820); in the lively Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, the observations of a fictitious Spaniard (1807); and in the anonymously published The Doctor, 7 vol. (183447), a fantastic, rambling miscellany packed with comment, quotations, and anecdotes (including the well-known children's classic The Story of the Three Bears). His less successful epic poems are verse romances having a mythological or legendary subject matter set in the past and in distant places. In his prose works and in his voluminous correspondence, which gives a detailed picture of his literary surroundings and friends, Southey's effortless mastery of prose is clearly evident, a fact attested to by such eminent contemporaries as William Hazlitt and Scott and even by such an enemy as Byron.