Robert Southey

Poems, 1799 (Dodo Press) Robert Southey

Robert Southey (1774-1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate. Although his fame tends to be eclipsed by that of his contemporaries and friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey's verse enjoys enduring popularity. Moreover, he was a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, historian and biographer. His biographies include the life and works of John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson. In 1808 he became acquainted with Walter Savage Landor whose early work he had admired, and the two developed mutual admiration of each other's work and became close friends. Although originally a radical supporter of the French Revolution, Southey followed the trajectory of fellow Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, towards conservatism. In 1807, he used the pseudonym Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella to write Letters from England (1807). The book is said to contain a more accurate picture of English ways at the beginning of the nineteenth century than exists anywhere else.