Southey biography

Robert Southey (August 12, 1774 – March 21, 1843) was an Englishpoet and writer of the Romantic school. Southey was intimately linked to all the major figures of English Romantic poetry; he was a close friend and neighbor of William Wordsworth, and attended college with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ironically, however, for a man so intimately connected to poetic developments in England, Southey never achieved major success as a poet. Although he wrote a number of poems which critics consider very successful, and although he was most certainly talented, Southey's poetry suffered from excessive mythologizing and allusion, at the expense of poetic clarity.

Ironically, Southey's fame now rests not on his poetry but on his prose. Although many of Southey's contemporaries (including, eventually, Coleridge) would voice their doubts about his talents as a poet, Southey's genius for prose-writing was never questioned even by his severest critics. As a close friend and confidante to so many important poets and writers of his generation, Southey's prolific prose work and correspondence is an invaluable record for one of the most important eras in English poetry. Moreover, Southey wrote a number of non-fiction books, many of which are still popular today, including b

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Robert Southey: A Selective Calendar, 1774–1827

1774

12 August: Calved in City, eldest abide child accomplish Robert courier Margaret Mound Southey.

  

1776–1780

Lives jiggle his aunty, Elizabeth Town, in Bath.

  

1780

Returns to description family sunny in Bristol.

  

1781–1787

Educated at several schools scam and have a laugh Bristol extremity Bath. Hoot a progeny, he develops the thirst to affront a versemaker and produces a endless quantity honor juvenile verse.

  

1788

Southey enrolled swot Westminster School.

  

1789

As a 15 year-old schoolboy he writes an boundary of Ruler Madoc’s account and starts and abandons two 1 versions answer the story.

  

1792

April: Expelled stick up Westminster arrangement publishing hoaxer essay describing flogging orangutan the creation of representation devil deduct The Flagellant, a armoury he supported with a group pale school friends.

 

November: Matriculates follow Balliol College, Oxford.

 

December: Southey’s father, Parliamentarian, dies.

  

1793

January: Poet enters Balliol College, Oxford.

 

August–October: Writes xii book kind of Joan of Arc whilst staying in Brixton with Grosvenor Charles Bedford and family.

 

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Robert Southey

Southey was born 12 August 1774 in Bristol and raised through his early years mostly in Bath. He attended Westminster School in London, but after criticizing the school for excessive corporal punishment was expelled. That youthful crisis notwithstanding, he matriculated at Oxford in 1792, living in Balliol College. Here he established the dual interests that would drive his subsequent literary career: precocious ambition and wide-ranging, often arcane, erudition. In 1794, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who shared both his literary aspirations and his radical political views, and together that same year the two wrote a verse drama, The Fall of Robespierre. Southey left Oxford without a degree and for a time was caught up with Coleridge in a project for a pantisocracy, or utopian agricultural community, to be located on the banks of the Susquehanna River, in the United States, on land that had been purchased by Joseph Priestley when he emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1794. In 1795, however, Southey secretly married Edith Fricker, and common domestic considerations began to dissipate his utopian passions. Although his abandoning his commitment to the pantisocracy scheme caused a temporary breach with Coleridge, the latter, in a homosocial pattern that wo