Robert Southey and the Emergence of Lyrical Ballads

Southey acquired fame, and infamy, early in his poetic career. His first volumes of poetry which were published in the late 1790's were all reviewed with some measure of favour as well as becoming targets for satire. Southey's output remains impressive and his range of poetic genres and sub-genres is some indication of the virtuosity and facility of the poet often working within fashionable parameters or upon the borders of metrical experiment. Southey's modes of expression and poetical subjects are equally wide-ranging. He employs sensibility, horror, the picturesque or political debate; he writes about slavery, injustice, women, his own development, historical events, to underline only a few categories of focus. By early 1797 Coleridge could write that he was "jealous for Robert Southey's fame" (Griggs I, 320) but that he feared the fluency and facility of the poet might result in an early decay of his work. "Besides," he added, "I am fearful that he will begin to rely too much on story and event in his poems, to the neglect of those lofty imaginings , that are peculiar to, and definitive of, the poet." Story and event were of course essential factors in the ballad idiom which saw a revival in the 1790s. Southey exploited story and event in many of his smaller poems, but often produced work of a high standard and not devoid of lofty imaginings, albeit in his own style. In this article I would like to explore the relationship of Southey's writing to the emergence of Lyrical Ballads and other poems. I want to show Southey as a practising writer and as a domesticated poet. I would like to suggest that his volume of Poems 1799 is some ways an 'answer' to Lyrical Ballads and to describe the contents of that volume. Finally, in a piece which brings together comments by Jonathan Wordsworth, Donald Priestman and others, I would like to give as an illustration of Wordsworth and Southey's intertextual 'conversation' regarding Southey's Inscriptions from Poems 1797 one example of poetry from Lyrical Ballads . There is still an amusing sense of outrage in the way in which some critics write about Southey's attitudes to and borrowings from Coleridge and Wordsworth, particularly when Lyrical Ballads , one of our cultural icons, is examined. Yet Southey, Coleridge (especially) and Wordsworth all indulged in the textual interactivity which was part of the late eighteenth-century literary scene, and which remains one of the chief accusations against Southey at the time of Lyrical Ballads' publication. If Coleridge is seen as the covert plagiarist, Southey is the unabashed textual pirate. But all three men had given themselves to that natural exchange of poetical ideas at least since 1795, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that Southey's small poems, especially inscriptions, ballads and poems on popular superstitions supply Wordsworth and Coleridge in part with models for their joint collaboration in Lyrical Ballads . I would not wish to defend Southey's methods in his ruthless drive for publications in 1798-9, the urgency of which I have tried to sketch elsewhere. He was supporting a household by his pen and therefore all sources of copy were fair game in the struggle. One of the additional reasons for any exploitation of the Lyrical Ballads volume of 1798 would have been Southey's personal interest in the ballad form, and certainly in the stories and situational events therein. We ought also to remember that Byron thought of the poet, however distortedly, as "the ballad-monger Southey" and of Wordsworth as the "dull disciple" of Southey's school of poetry and that this was …