Southey, Robert

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English poet and author. He is sometimes regarded as one of the ‘Lake poets’, more because of his friendship with English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth and residence in Keswick, in the English Lake District, than for any influence of Romanticism in his work. In 1813 he became poet laureate, but he is better known for his Life of Nelson (1813) and for his letters.

Southey was born in Bristol and educated at Oxford. He became a friend of Coleridge in 1794 and the two poets collaborated on a play, The Fall of Robespierre, the same year. In 1795 he married Edith Fricker and in 1796 visited Lisbon and published Letters Written during a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797). In 1803 he moved to Keswick, where he lived near Wordsworth. His long epic poems include Madoc (1805), Thalaba the Destroyer (1807), and The Curse of Kehama (1810). In 1807 he obtained a small government pension, and in 1813 became poet laureate, after Scottish poet Walter Scott had refused the honour. Southey declined both the editorship of The Times and a baronetcy in 1835.

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