Southey, Robert 1774-1843
English poet and writer

Born in Bristol, he was sent to Westminster School, but he was expelled in 1792 for his Jacobin sympathies and for denouncing whipping in the school magazine, and went on to Balliol College, Oxford. He met Coleridge in Bristol in 1794 and they wrote a topical drama together, The Fall of Robespierre (1794); Southey published a volume of Poems (1795) and an epic poem, Joan of Arc (1795). Also in 1795 he married Edith Fricker (d.1838), whose elder sister Sara married Coleridge. He made two trips to Lisbon (1795 and 1800) and then, after studying law, settled in Keswick. He had only �160 a year from a friend on which to live, until the government gave him a similar amount in 1807, by which time Southey's political views had mellowed. He had joined the Tory Quarterly Review in 1809 and remained a contributor under William Gifford and John Lockhart. He became Poet Laureate in 1813. Many of his short poems are well-known, such as 'Holly Tree' and 'After Blenheim'. His other works include biographies of Nelson (1813), Wesley (1820) and Bunyan (1830), A Vision of Judgment (1821), Naval History (1833-40), and The Doctor (1834-47), a miscellany, which includes the nursery classic The Three Bears. He also published a Journal of a Tour of Scotland in 1819 (1929).

Bibliography: J Simmons, Robert Southey (1945)