Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death.
25 Facts About Robert Southey
2.
Robert Southey is remembered especially for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".
3.
Robert Southey was born in Wine Street, Bristol, to Robert Southey and Margaret Hill.
4.
Robert Southey was educated at Westminster School, London, and at Balliol College, Oxford.
5.
Robert Southey went to Oxford with "a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon".
6.
Robert Southey then wrote many ballads, went to Spain in 1800, and on his return settled in the Lake District.
7.
Robert Southey was appointed laureate in 1813, a post he came greatly to dislike.
8.
In 1821, Robert Southey wrote A Vision of Judgment, to commemorate George III, in the preface to which he attacked Byron who, as well as responding with a parody, The Vision of Judgment, mocked him frequently in Don Juan.
9.
In 1837, Edith died and Robert Southey remarried, to Caroline Anne Bowles, a poet, on 4 June 1839.
10.
Robert Southey's mind was giving way when he wrote a last letter to his friend Walter Savage Landor in 1839, but he continued to mention Landor's name when generally incapable of mentioning anyone.
11.
Robert Southey died on 21 March 1843 and was buried in the churchyard of Crosthwaite Church, Keswick, where he had worshipped for forty years.
12.
Robert Southey was a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, essay writer, historian and biographer.
13.
Robert Southey's biographies include the life and works of John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson.
14.
Robert Southey was a generous man, particularly kind to Coleridge's abandoned family, but he incurred the enmity of many, including Hazlitt as well as Byron, who felt he had betrayed his principles in accepting pensions and the laureateship, and in retracting his youthful ideals.
15.
Robert Southey argued against parliamentary reform, blamed the Peterloo Massacre on an allegedly revolutionary "rabble" killed and injured by government troops, and spurned Catholic emancipation.
16.
Robert Southey had in mind figures like Thomas Jonathan Wooler and William Hone, whose prosecution he urged.
17.
In some respects, Robert Southey was ahead of his time in his views on social reform.
18.
Robert Southey was appalled by the living conditions in towns like Birmingham and Manchester and especially by employment of children in factories and outspoken about them.
19.
Robert Southey sympathised with the pioneering socialist plans of Robert Owen, advocated that the state promote public works to maintain high employment, and called for universal education.
20.
In 1817, Robert Southey was confronted with the surreptitious publication of a radical play, Wat Tyler, which he had written in 1794 at the height of his radical period.
21.
Robert Southey was often mocked for what were seen as sycophantic odes to the king, notably in Byron's long ironic dedication of Don Juan to Southey.
22.
Much of the animosity between the two men can be traced back to Byron's belief that Robert Southey had spread rumours about him and Percy Bysshe Shelley being in a "League of Incest" during their time on Lake Geneva in 1816, an accusation that Robert Southey strenuously denied.
23.
Robert Southey wished to continue living in the Lake District and preferred to defend the Church of England in writing rather than speech.
24.
Robert Southey was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1822.
25.
Robert Southey was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy.