Robert Southey

Southey, Robert 

Born Aug. 12, 1774, in Bristol; died Mar. 21, 1843, at Great Hall, near the city of Keswick. English poet. A representative of the Lake School of Poets.

From 1792 to 1794, Southey studied at Oxford University, where he and S. T. Coleridge became friends. In 1795 his first anthology of verse, Poems, was published. Although he was originally a radical, as shown in the drama Wat Tyler (1794; published 1817), by the end of the 1790’s Southey had become a reactionary; his works are increasingly marked by mysticism and theological didacticism, an evolution that is reflected in the narrative poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), Madoc (1805), The Curse of Kehama (1810), and Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814). The narrative poem The Vision of Judgement (1821) inspired a satirical parody of the same title by Lord Byron.

Southey’s works had an influence on W. Scott and P. B. Shelley. In Russia his works were translated by A. S. Pushkin, V. A. Zhukovskii, A. N. Pleshcheev, N. S. Gumilev, and E. G. Bagritskii.

WORKS

Poems. Oxford, 1909.
Life and Correspondence, vols. 1–6. London, 1849–50.
In Russian translation:
Ballady. Petrograd, 1922. (Preface by N. Gumilev.)

REFERENCES

Elistratova, A. A. Nasledie angliiskogo romantizma i sovremennost’. Moscow, 1960.
Simmons, J. Southey. London, 1945.
Carnall, G. Robert Southey and His Age. Oxford, 1960.

A. N. GORBUNOV