“A great many second-rate poets, in fact, are second-rate just for this reason, that they have not the sensitiveness and consciousness to perceive that they feel differently from the preceding generation, and therefore must use words differently.” So wrote T. S. Eliot, with the eighteenth century in mind: and few poets better illustrate the truth of his insight than Robert Southey (1774–1843). Southey is the forgotten man of English Romanticism, whose poems were little studied until recently even by specialists, and, while available in facsimile, had never been edited on modern principles. Mark Storey’s sympathetic biography, which appeared in 1997, still had to use the original printings. Yet in his own day Southey was compared by some to Milton, and Cardinal Newman, of all people, knew great stretches of his work by heart. Now, reading through this handsome new five-volume edition of his epics and selected shorter poems, written between 1793 and 1810, a reassessment is possible.¹

Southey’s life offers a melancholy spectacle.

Southey’s life offers a melancholy spectacle. His first fourteen years are described in an autobiographical fragment which is among his best writing, and should be reprinted. The son of a draper in the west of England, he passed a lonely early childhood with his mother’s forbidding half-sister, apparently to save his parents the expense of maintaining him. He was under virtual house arrest; he knew no other children, he was not allowed to play, although he was frequently taken to the theater. His main recreation was reading, and he developed a particular taste for epic poems, together with the ambition to write one himself. Bookish and hypersensitive, he was miserable at a succession of grim schools, where his teachers were both frightening and incompetent, bullying was rife, and the basics of safety, nourishment, and hygiene were neglected.

In 1788, at the age of fourteen, he went to Westminster, one of the leading public schools in England, which stands in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament. Things were little better there: the masters were mediocre, the curriculum unexciting, the weak and vulnerable tormented. Southey made a few close friends, but gained a reputation for indiscipline which came to a head when he published an article in a school newspaper he had helped to start, denouncing floggers as the ministers of Satan. He was promptly expelled, and was lucky to secure admission to Balliol College, Oxford, which he entered in 1793, just about the time that Louis XVI was executed, plunging France and Britain into war.

Like many others at this time, Southey sided with the French, a view which did nothing for his popularity in deeply conservative Oxford. Here again, he encountered apathetic teachers and mindless conformity to antiquated protocol. His verdict was pithy: “waste of wigs and want of wisdom.” As at Westminster, he kept to a small social circle, and wrote copiously. By the time he was nineteen he calculated that he had produced 35,000 lines of verse, including the first draft of his poem glorifying Joan of Arc (included in Volume One of this edition). His tuition fees were met by an uncle, who expected him to become a clergyman in the Church of England. Southey, however, was repelled by this idea: “I deny the necessity of an established faith, and of a religious establishment.” He considered medicine and the Civil Service, before his imagination was fired by a utopian dream of an island community, self-supporting and self-governing, naturally virtuous and philosophic in outlook. At this crucial juncture he was introduced, through a common friend, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was to become his brother-in-law.

Coleridge’s dazzling talk swayed Southey into agreeing to a scheme of emigration, together with a small group of like-minded men and women, to found a colony in America. Set against this vision, Oxford seemed more futile than ever, and Southey quit it in 1794 without taking a degree. As might have been foreseen, the American project came to nothing. It was a pipe-dream of young men with no money, no prospects, no real knowledge of America, and no support from those who held their purse-strings. Southey’s aunt cast him out when he finally nerved himself to tell her of his plans, and to add that, impecunious as he was, he had become secretly engaged. When an uncle in Portugal invited him for a visit, it seemed prudent to go. He became fascinated by the country, and by Spain which he also visited shortly afterwards, learning both languages and writing one of his sharpest prose works, Letters From England (1807), a critique of contemporary society, in the persona of a Spanish tourist.

In 1798, Southey met Wordsworth, whose collection of that year, Lyrical Ballads, had a great influence on him (more of that shortly). Volume Five of this edition contains 197 items, of which 181 were written between 1793 and 1799, and even these do not constitute Southey’s total output during that period. His epic ambitions persisted. He dreamed of poems which should explore the major world mythologies. Three of them, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), Madoc (1805), and The Curse of Kehama (1810), appear as Volumes Three, Two, and Four, respectively, of this edition: we are spared Roderick, King of the Goths (1814). It is now impossible to see why these poems were ever admired. Simply to consider their subject matter is to feel the heart sink: a struggle between the pious Welsh and the bloodthirsty Aztecs (Madoc), a son’s revenge for his father’s slaughter by a demon (Thalaba), a wicked Rajah’s attempt to conquer not only this world but the next as well (Kehama). They are completely mechanical and external productions, null and void, not worth the care which has been lavished upon them here. Their editors naturally do not agree, but they produce no arguments for the poems’ literary value, that being a category of judgment they do not really recognize. It is enough for them that Southey participates in the discourse of colonialism or the exploration of the oriental Other. It will not be enough for people with little money, and less time, to spare on the aesthetic equivalent of grave-robbing.

In 1803 Southey settled in Keswick, in the Lake District, where he passed the remaining forty years of his life. Its sad tale is soon told. By the time of his appointment as Poet Laureate, in 1813, he had written most of his poetry. Yet he worked unremittingly: biographies of Nelson and John Wesley, histories of Brazil and of the Peninsular War, essays, and a long prose work, The Doctor, inspired (or at least caused) by Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. He endured cruel bereavements: his ten-year-old son died in 1816, his thirteen-year-old daughter in 1826, and his wife in 1837 after three years of insanity during which he had nursed her devotedly. When he remarried, his surviving children openly detested his second wife. His own mind began to give way. He sat among his library of fourteen thousand volumes, patting their covers affectionately, but unable to read, write, or hold a coherent conversation. “I wish my head was in the right place,” he was overheard to say to himself one day. He died, worn out with toil and care, in 1848. He had lived to see himself pilloried as a turncoat by reviewers who never let him forget his youthful radicalism. In the one episode which has kept his name alive, he was savaged by Byron in The Vision of Judgement (1822), a devastating satire of his fawning apotheosis of the newly-dead George III, A Vision of Judgement (1821). Byron’s poem remains celebrated while Southey’s is unread (and, unfortunately, it lies beyond the chronological limits of this edition). To all attacks Southey remained icily indifferent. His cool self-assessment rings true: “I am a very reserved man, never unbending except to those whom I love.”

In the essay I quoted at the start of this review, Eliot offered his famous aphorism, “Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.” Not everyone would call Wordsworth a genius, but it was he who decisively altered expression in the 1790s. Actually, the assumption that the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798 marked a completely new form and style in English poetry is not wholly correct. Gray, Chatterton, Burns, and Blake had been making stylistic experiments for some time, and critical debate was already raging over the alleged “debasement” of language involved in speaking of what were felt to be “improper” subjects for poetry in an ordinary way, entailing an impoverishment of feeling. “It is absurd to suppose,” wrote Francis Jeffrey, reviewing Thalaba, “that an author should make use of the language of the vulgar to express the sentiments of the refined.”

In the 1790s, however, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the apparent failure of the motivating ideals of republicanism, increasing political repression in Britain, and the rise of Bonaparte, “the vulgar” were speaking harsher words in new accents. Southey’s sequence of poems, published in 1797, attacking slavery, his “Botany Bay Eclogues” (1797) and “English Eclogues” (1799) chart a landscape populated by paupers, vagrants, soldiers discharged to a life of aimlessness and drifting into petty crime to become transported convicts, war widows and their dependent infants, the destitute, the criminal underworld, and those struggling to survive on subsistence levels consequent upon the Industrial Revolution. “How far poems requiring almost a colloquial plainness of language may accord with the public taste,” he wrote nervously, “I am doubtful.” This was in 1799. Wordsworth’s famous preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, with its equivocally worded defense of “a selection of language really used by men,” consisting of “simple and unelaborated expressions” and its rejection of “what is usually called poetic diction,” was a contribution to, not the initiation of, the controversy.

Southey’s debts to Wordsworth are apparent in specific poems, as the scholar Mary Jacobus pointed out in the 1970s.

Nonetheless, Southey’s debts to Wordsworth are apparent in specific poems, as the scholar Mary Jacobus pointed out in the 1970s. The most interesting link is that both wrote poems entitled “The Ruined Cottage,” and this enables us to compare their methods in detail. Wordsworth had been the first debtor, borrowing from some striking lines in Joan of Arc. In the 1798 version of “The Ruined Cottage” (which he later revised and enlarged), Wordsworth uses the figure of a pedlar to tell the poem’s narrator the story of a laboring family which gradually falls on hard times: after two poor harvests in succession the husband loses his work, becomes ill-tempered, and finally joins the army to provide money for his wife and two sons. He is never heard of again. The elder boy becomes an apprentice and has to leave home, the younger one dies, and their mother, heartbroken by her husband’s disappearance, neglects herself, her cottage, and her garden, and finally dies too. All this is explained carefully, and convincingly set against a backdrop of economic hardship and national unrest. In Southey’s much shorter poem, the speaker tells a straightforward tale of a widow whose daughter, “by a villain’s wiles seduced,” becomes a fallen woman; the old mother dies of grief. Melodrama and pathos are all that Southey has to offer, but Wordsworth uses his situation to prompt larger questions about human destiny:

In Southey, the countryside around the cottage is merely scenery; in Wordsworth it is, as usual, a source of moral instruction. Far from seeking to rouse our pity for his story, Wordsworth’s pedlar insists that brooding on disaster is unhealthy:

Contrast Southey:

But what are they? Southey invokes feelings; Wordsworth explores them, in keeping with his celebrated definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Just as much as Proust, Wordsworth distinguished between voluntary and involuntary memory: thanks to the detachment consequent upon the interval between the experience and its recollection, the poet can define and understand feelings which he originally had no time to examine objectively. The contemplative, philosophical dimension in Wordsworth has no equivalent in Southey, who has a sense of pathos, but not of tragedy (he kept that for his own life, alas).

In “Eclogue. The Wedding,” a woman catalogues the miseries of the poor for the enlightenment of a passing traveller who witnesses a village wedding: he duly gives her alms. There is generous indignation in “The Sailor’s Mother,” as another traveller offers conventional bien-pensant platitudes to a woman whose son has been blinded in the war: “Old England’s gratitude/ Makes the maim’d sailor happy,” and “Your grateful country . . . with a noble charity relieves/ The widow and the orphan”: yet there is no equivalent to the description, in the Wordsworth poem Southey has in mind, “Old Man Travelling,” of the stricken parent, “A man who does not move with pain, but moves/ With thought . . . insensibly subdued/ To settled quiet.” In Southey’s “The Idiot,” the halfwit son disinters his mother’s corpse, unable to grasp that she is dead, and attempts to chafe her awake again:

The source poem, Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy,” will have none of such cant: the boy, sent on a midnight ride to fetch the doctor for a sick neighbour, is quizzed about his experiences but will only say “The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,/ And the sun did shine so cold.” The psychological insight into the way the unfamiliar is assimilated to the familiar by the non-logical mind is a world away from Southey’s cheap exercise in the macabre. I have mentioned only a fraction of the poems in Volume Five, but these are the most ambitious. By the crucial criterion of originality of thought and style, we can see why Wordsworth remains a significant writer, and Southey does not. “I exist more among the dead than the living,” Southey wrote to Coleridge in 1804, “and think more about them, and perhaps feel more about them.” That is not a recipe for creativity. This edition unintentionally gives us all the evidence we need to confirm the verdict of posterity.

Paul Dean is Head of English at Dragon School, Oxford and a Fellow of the English Association.

Notes