Robert Southey. Poetical Works 1793–1810. General Editor Lynda Pratt. 5 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004. ISBN: 1 85196 731 1. Price: £450 (US$750).

It is hard to think of a literary figure so central to the major aesthetic and political debates of his or her times and whose work has been so clouded and obscured by later generations of critics and literary historian as that of Robert Southey. Southey befriended Coleridge before Wordsworth and, between them, the two young poets advocated a new kind of simplicity in poetic verse, as well as the communitarian scheme of Pantisocracy which suited their then radical politics. Southey developed (after Beckford and Landor), in Thalaba the Destroyer and the Curse of Kehama, the Orientalist epic that Byron would later tailor to the early nineteenth century taste for the exotic. His verse contains one of the first female vampires in English literary history. He pushed the national epic in new directions with his Joan of Arc and Madoc. Southey was a key member of the ‘Lake School’, as defined by Francis Jeffrey, in an attempt to outline and criticize a new poetic grouping antithetical to the decorum and rules of neo-classicism. He was an important influence, then antagonist, of the next generation of younger, radical poets, Byron and Shelley for whom he became the archetypal political apostate, an ‘epic renegade’ for an epic time. He was an important commentator and essayist who wrote voluminously about his own age and its leading trends and fashions. On a biographical note he was probably the man responsible for ensuring a cold-footed Coleridge’s marriage to his intended sister-in-law Sara Fricker, a miscalculation he paid for heavily when Coleridge offloaded his wife and family on him a few years later. It is hard for us to imagine exactly what the literary scene would have been like without his presence. Would ‘Romanticism’ as we know it, look anything like it does to us today without his contribution? Almost certainly not. As General Editor Lynda Pratt points out, Southey is ‘a kind of “missing link” in contemporary romantic studies’ (I, xxiii). The editors of this new edition of Southey’s Poetical Works, 1793-1810 (Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts) are clear that Southey is not just an important poet of the period (such as George Crabbe for instance) but also a key Romantic poet: ‘Southey was at the heart of the movement we call Romanticism, and that his Oriental romance, just as much as ‘Tintern Abbey’ or ‘The Ancient Mariner’, is a quintessential Romantic poem’ (3, xxiii). Yet there has as yet been no authoritative and complete edition of this quintessential Romantic writer’s poetry or prose. Not for him were the substantial editorial projects that expensively produced multi-volume editions from Cornell or Princeton University Presses. We are therefore extremely grateful for this magnificent new, five-volume edition of Southey’s poetry from Pickering and Chatto, edited by a team of distinguished Romanticists (and Southey scholars) led by Pratt, who produced three of the volumes herself. This is the first modern scholarly edition of Southey’s poetry and it coincides with a period of major reassessment of his complex contributions to romantic period culture. It includes extensive use of previously unpublished manuscript poems and texts not included in the major lifetime edition of Poetical Works (1837–8). To an extent the edition reproduces the quandary that informs our positions on Southey. Do we take him seriously as a poet, or does his importance stem from his privileged historical position and his undeniable influence as model and/or as satirical Byronic target? Is Southey a key Romantic writer, or is his work somehow an alternative kind of Romantic writing to that of Wordsworth, so long metonymic of Romanticism itself. …