Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism

Abstract

ROBERT SOUTHEY AND THE CONTEXTS OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM. Edited by Lynda Pratt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. xxix + 267. ISBN 0-7546-3046-3. £55.00. It is ironic that the posthumous fate of Robert Southey as a poet has been so prey to the vagaries of a capricious literary history, considering the amount of energy he evidently devoted to ordering his life's work and the amount of time he spent considering his future reputation. In the final essay of this volume, the editor, Lynda Pratt, offers some salutary thoughts on the neglect of this Lake poet, not least on the bickering between Southey's second wife, Caroline, and his son Cuthbert over the poet's literary estate that resulted in rival editions of his verse. Pratt notes that on his death in March 1843, 'Southey left a divided family and a number of uncompleted projects', and it might be argued that the full realisation of these projects and the attempt to provide Southey's verse with editorial coherence is a project still ongoing. Pratt's editorship of the Poetical Works has made Southey accessible to a wider audience, while a forthcoming electronic collection of the letters promises to further aid Southey's rehabilitation. Add this largely excellent collection of essays and it is hard to dispute the editor's claim that this is an exciting time to be working on Southey. Southey's concern to shape an English national literary history seems to have operated alongside his desire to oversee the development of his own poetical canon, as the first two essays in this volume, by David Fairer and Nick Groom, suggest. There is some kinship with Wordsworth exhibited in Southey's desire to trace an organically English spirit of poetry from Chaucer through Spenser and Milton to his own Romantic contemporaries. Southey's emphasis is placed on historical and personal continuity, and Groom's essay on the endeavours to collect and edit Chatterton's works fits the model proposed by Fairer, whilst also demonstrating the generosity of Southey's aid to Chatterton's sister, Mary Newton - in equal parts we find philanthropy and canon-formation. Widening the focus from a fellow Bristolean to the nation, Paul Jarman looks through the 'lost' work of the 1790s, the 'Kalendar', considering what it tells us, alongside the Commonplace Book, about Southey's youthful desire to commemorate the national spirit through anniversary poems. Further evidence of the stress on national continuity is later offered by David M. Craig's discussion of 'Robert Southey as a Public Moralist'. What emerges most powerfully here, however, is the domestic and economic necessity that, in part, drove Southey to abandon verse for writing history and journalism. His so-called apostasy is still a favourite shorthand for pigeonholing Southey politically. This story of the movement away from writing poetry, at least for public consumption, is less well-known. The yearning for continuity does not mean that Southey was easily able to smooth out the rough edges of his working life, as Nicola Trott's essay on the juvenilia and minor poems attests. The 'poemets' and 'poemlings' - invented categories of verse - that Trott discusses reflect the 'post hoc rationalization of forms' into which Southey ordered his remarkably plural poetic output. …