Robert Southey

In a letter to a friend dated 26 July 1796 the young Robert Southey, who had just made a promising start as a poet with his revolutionary epic Joan of Arc, characteristically wrote : « I saw five or six men on Sunday stoning a dog to death-and I heard the dog's cries-and I wished I had been the Exterminating Angel ». An emotional, nervous, almost pathologically shy man, Southey would often react in a violent way to defend causes which he considered just. Leading a secluded life in the Lake District, he kept actively participating in the social, economic, and political debates that prevailed in England during the first half of the XIXth century. The life of this committed writer appointed Poet Laureate in 1813 was an unending crusade against evil. His two most illustrious enemies were Napoleon, whom he not seldom beheaded in his dreams, and Lord Byron, the very embodiment of Satanic forces in his view. This biographical study should help the reader properly estimate the voluminous work-too long relegated to an undeserved purgatory-of a talented man of letters whose influence on the Romantic movement was far greater than is commonly admitted.