Robert Southey: A Lake Poet
Posted: Tuesday, December 21, 2004
by Bill Ectric
Billectric
In the early 1800's there were a group of writers known as The Lake Poets. This was because they all lived in the "Lake District" in northwestern England. They are usually listed as a trio, but two of them are somewhat more famous than the third. The Lake Poets are: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Robert Southey. These poets were part of what was called The Romantic Movement from the late 1700's and early 1800's. The "Romantic Movement" was about brave heroes of the past, like Greeks and Romans, and also more modern day heroes. Each progressive era of poets and writers tried to speak in a more common, less artificial style, even though by today's standards Robert Southey sounds stilted. It's as though we have to read Southey through the misty fog of another time. Every literary movement sets the stage for the next one, so while some people find the Romanticists "square" and the Transcendentalists "hip", we should acknowledge the contribution of one to another.
Coleridge and Southey influenced one another to each accept a point of view that favored the common man, equality of all people, the abolition of slavery, and a poetry that more closely favored the common speach of the day.
I call Robert Southey "the underdog" because his poetry is somewhat harder to "get into" and he has been called, by some, inferior to Coleridge and Wordsworth. The Columbia Encyclopedia say Southey's "reputation as a poet rests upon his friendships with Coleridge and Wordsworth." His writing seems a little old fashion but it reflects modern ideas. Sometimes it conjures visions that are uncomfortable to see:
In an anti-slavery poem, Southey wrote:
"High in the air exposed the slave is hung,
To all the birds of heaven, their living food!"
It is a shocking scene but Southey was passionately opposed to slavery as well as war and he does not hold back.
The way I discovered Southey was, when I was about five years old, my parents had a set of encyclopedias called The Book of Knowledge and favorite pages were where it showed a skeleton, and when you turned the clear plastic page, all the muscles went over the skeleton. Turn the page again and all the vital organs fit in, then the nerves, then the skin. I was fascinated by that.
But one day I chanced to turn the pages further and I came upon an illustration of and old man sitting in a field holding a skull, with a small boy child in front of him and a small girl child trotting up into the scene. A poem called The Battle of Blenheim by Robert Southey filled the page below. I must have been barely old enough to understand it - my mother read it to me and explained - it was about the futility of war. The old man explains that the skull is from a soldier who died in battle years ago.
"But it was a great victory," says the old man.
The little girl says, "But what good came of it?"
The old man says, "That, I cannot tell. But (they say) it was a great victory."
Robert Southey, one of the Lake Poets.
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