The first item in the first issue of The Liberal: Byron's The Vision of Judgement

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Period ◽  
Poet Laureate ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Leigh Hunt

The Liberal is one of the most important journals of the Romantic period, the brainchild of Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Byron. It was inevitable that Byron's poem, an attack on Robert Southey, the poet laureate, would be in the first issue. 7,000 copies were printed and 4,000 sold, enough to make the new journal a huge success.

1780–1820 Southey’s New Star Chamber: Literature, Revolution, and Romantic-Era Libel

2019 ◽  
pp. 221-282
Author(s):  
Thomas Keymer
Keyword(s):  
Free Radical ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Political Tension ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Star Chamber ◽  
William Cobbett

Phases of high political tension during the Romantic period, notably under Pitt after the French Revolution and under Liverpool following the Napoleonic Wars, indicate the ongoing importance, and sometimes the severity, of press control between 1780 and 1820. But control was becoming more difficult in practice, and the consequences for poetry and other literary genres are sometimes overstated at a time when the overwhelming priority for the authorities was cheap (or worse, free) radical print. This chapter surveys key cases of prosecution and/or pillorying across the period (Daniel Isaac Eaton, Walter Cox, William Hone, William Cobbett), and argues that the writers now central to the Romantic canon were relatively unaffected. The striking exception is Robert Southey, whose incendiary Wat Tyler, which embarrassingly emerged at the height of Southey’s Tory pomp two decades later, is newly contextualized and interpreted.

Robert Southey and the Language of Social Discipline

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 630-655 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Harling
Keyword(s):  
Child Labor ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
Savings Banks ◽  
Poet Laureate ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Social Discipline ◽  
The Military

Robert Southey is probably still best remembered as a versifying turncoat, the most reactionary and least anthologized Lake poet. He owes this reputation to the reformers of his own day, who took it amiss when he renounced his youthful dreams of radical egalitarianism and appeared to exchange them for the £300 a year he made by scribbling Court-ordered odes as Poet Laureate. By the late 1810s, opposition M.P.s were scolding him on the Commons floor for urging the suppression of just the sort of republican sentiments that he himself had committed to paper in the 1790s. Byron memorably sent him up as an apostate hack:He had written praises of a regicide;He had written praises of all kings whatever;He had written for republics far and wide,And then against them bitterer than ever;He had sung against all battles, and againIn their high praise and glory; he had call'dReviewing “the ungentle craft,” and thenBecome as base a critic as e'er crawl'd–Fed, paid, and pamper'd by the very menBy whom his muse and morals had been maul'd:He had written much blank verse, and blanker prose,And more of both than anybody knows.Despite being the target of such devastating attack, Southey nevertheless has had plenty of defenders over the last century and a half. Most of them have stressed his consistent commitment to humanitarian interventionism. Cuthbert Southey established this far more positive critical tradition by stressing the reforms that his father had repeatedly advocated in print: reduction of child labor in factories; addition of Anglican churches and clergymen, especially in poor urban districts; public works schemes in times of distress; land allotments for poor laborers; cultivation of waste lands by paupers; reduction of the Bloody Code and of corporal punishment in the military, along with some of the more punitive measures enshrined in the poor laws and game laws; establishment of savings banks, emigration schemes, Protestant sisterhoods of charity, and, most importantly, a national system of Anglican, state-aided popular education.

Slavery in Brazil as Described by Americans, 1822–1888

1961 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manoel Cardozo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Life Span ◽  
English Language ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Poet Laureate ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Brazilian History

By the end of the nineteenth century the American public, if it had cared to enlarge upon its knowledge of the Empire of Brazil, could easily have done so without even the necessity of learning a foreign language. From 1822 to 1888, beginning with the independence of Brazil from Portugal and ending with the abolition of slavery— a period corresponding almost exactly with the life span of the Brazilian Empire—about twenty books on Brazil were published by Americans. These were obviously not the only books on the subject in the English language because Britishers wrote about Brazil too (indeed they wrote more about it than we did) and these books on Brazil were also available on this side of the Atlantic. The combined output of the two nations was, therefore, considerable, and the curiosity of the Anglo-Saxon mind which it for the most part reflected presented Brazil to the American reader under a great variety of aspects. There were the solid three volumes on the colonial period of Brazilian history by Robert Southey, the poet laureate of England who was much better as a historian, and the two-volume sequel by John Armitage, who was neither a historian nor a poet but a lover of liberty.

The Paper War Between England and America: The Inchiquin Episode, 1810–1815

1982 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert G. Eldridge
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Character ◽  
Poet Laureate ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Real Issue ◽  
Moral Condition ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
British People

In the London Quarterly Review for January 1814 appeared a long and brilliantly written review of an anonymous American pamphlet entitled Inchiquin the Jesuit's Letters, which had been published in New York some four years earlier. The pamphlet, indeed, was only of passing interest to the Quarterly. The real issue was the moral condition of the United States, an enemy which had to be dealt with during the coming year first militarily then diplomatically. The British reader was to be assured that the Americans should be handled no less severely than the French. To this end, the essayist revealed the distressing truth: through Gallic influence the Yankees had become imperialists, and the mania pervaded every aspect of life in the States. It followed that such a people should be chastised without scruple — whatever their English affinities. American magazines called the review a “collected mass of calumny and falsehood against a whole nation,” a “nefarious tissue of calumnies on the American character,” a copy of “all the effusions of malevolence, misrepresentation, and ignorance” which the Quarterly could find against “American taste, customs, morality, and literature.” Even a few notable Britons were embarrassed: the venerated Wilberforce called on John Quincy Adams in London to explain that the Quarterly's opinions of the United States were not those of the British people, and Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate and a major contributor to the magazine, told young George Ticknor in Paris after the war (a conflict that the Tory Southey had supported enthusiastically) that nothing in his literary career had caused him more mortification than “being thought” the author of the piece.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-258
Author(s):  
Samantha Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Original Poetry ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Leigh Hunt

What is the value of Romantic albums and album verses? Poems often figure the album as a cornucopia or treasure, yet the critical reception derided this positive valuation, and many albums were destroyed or lost. The Victorian afterlife of Romantic album culture shows how its ambivalent relation to the print marketplace contributed both to its democratization and its decline as a medium for original poetry and creative experimentation. In 1830s album verses, Leigh Hunt aligned the female album-owner with the commodified ‘scrap-beggar’, while Robert Southey thought only partisan collectors would save unique books from destruction. The afterlives of Dora Wordsworth and Emma Isola Moxon’s albums demonstrate these conflicts, yet digital culture can help recover albums and album poetry from neglect. Joanna Baillie’s simile of the album as a net of fish affirms Album Verses’ arguments for the creative and ethical possibilities of album poetry as manuscript form in the age of mass print.

Southey the Epic-Headed

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert F. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Narrative Art ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Epic Poems ◽  
The Stranger

Abstract Dubious though the honour may be, if anybody dominated the anglophone epic poetry scene across the Romantic period it was Robert Southey. For forty years he was at work on one or another extended verse narrative, with topics that represented, on four continents, cultures from medieval Christendom, Islam, Hindustan, and the indigenous New World. Between the two quite different versions of Joan of Arc that he published in 1796 and 1837 appeared Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), Madoc (1805), The Curse of Kehama (1810), Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814), and A Tale of Paraguay (1825). Southey’s chosen themes of contest and conquest threw into high relief the profile of each culture he seized on, as in a different register did his characteristically bookish and condescending notes. Enlightened skepticism about alien systems of belief, joined to antinomian indifference to the internal logic of social patterns, disposed Southey’s epics to forms of causal overdrive that impoverish their narrative interest, even as they fulfill a whole set of now widely discredited clichés about Romantic alienation, transcendence, unstoppable will and insatiable desire. To Southey’s known importance for his Laker contemporaries, and his impact on Byron and Shelley in the next generation, may be added an extensive legacy to Victorian verse and prose narrative art: an influence that is the stranger given the extremity of his example. Action after action in Southey’s epic poems illustrates the incompatibility with heroic virtue of any course of action – i. e., any plot – that does not result in personal, national, or (at the imaginative bedrock these slighter levels imply) cosmic catastrophe.

Robert Southey

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Robert Southey
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