特別寄稿論文 Robert Southey’s Career Nicholas Roe Synopsis The essay concerns some of the paradoxes of Robert Southey’s career, which stretched from the French Revolution through to the early Victorian era, in particular continuities between his early revolutionary enthusiasm and the relentless energy of his professional life as a writer. His presence in anthologies is surveyed, and a range of critical responses is discussed. Finally, by way of identifying a more personal formative circumstance that may have shaped and impelled his life and writings, the essay explores the signifi cance of a memory from Southey’s early boyhood. * * * ‘There is about [Southey] and his career something unexplained’, David Rannie mused in 1907, ‘a touch of paradox, a trace of the injustice of fame, which makes him interesting’.1 Appointed Poet Laureate in 1813, Southey was acknowledged the most accomplished and productive writer of the age; yet for later generations he came to seem insignifi cant, irrel- evant, even an embarrassment when considered alongside his Romantic contemporaries. His unfl agging energy and teeming publications might even appear suspicious, impelled by ‘the early shaping given to his mind’ during the French Revolution – ‘decidedly revolutionary’, said Hazlitt, ‘the distraction of the time has unsettled him’.2 Looking to Southey’s childhood, Seamus Perry has suggested that a ‘formative disorientation and self-estrangement’ might explain the peculiarity of Southey’s career; thus, his unremitting work, year after year, may have been a way of blocking-off memories of disruptive ‘pullings-apart’ and fragmentations.3 [ 1 ] 2 Nicholas Roe In seeking other contextual factors, Bill Speck explains that with the rise of nineteenth-century ideas of Romantic genius – to which Southey largely did not conform – ‘his stock slumped’, and his works were neglected.4 The reality is however stranger and more paradoxical, for while Southey has never been entirely neglected, critics and commentators have been unable to reach a consensus about the nature of his achievement – as if infected by something disjointed and restless in Southey himself. The ‘Jacobin’ poet of the ‘Botany Bay Eclogues’ and Joan of Arc became the Laureate poet of A Vision of Judgement; having written a series of experimental verse epics, he concentrated his energies on prose writings – biographies, social commentary, a novel. In this article I want to explore the nature of fame’s injustice to Southey, through nineteenth and twentieth-century literary histories and anthologies and a range of critical views. I’ll then offer some remarks about Southey’s autobiographical refl ections, and will conclude by speculating about one darkly ‘formative disorientation’ that may have shaped Southey’s career and some aspects of posterity’s view of him. Southey’s presence in anthologies of poetry has been inconsistent, with a marked decline in twentieth and twenty-fi rst century collections. Most frequently anthologized were extracts from The Curse of Kehama and Thalaba (often minus their notes) followed by Mary the Maid of the Inn, excerpts from Roderick, His Books, The Holly Tree, Inchcape Rock, and Botany Bay Eclogues. His output is most fully represented in Beeton’s Great Book of Poetry (1881, fi fteen poems) and T. H.Ward’s English Poets (1880, eight poems), while Francis Palgrave’s fi rst Golden Treasury (1861) has just two poems: ‘The Battle of Blenheim’ and ‘My Days among the Dead’ (Byron had 8 poems, Keats and Shelley 11 and 22, Wordsworth 41). A clutch of lyrics and extracts from Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama appeared in One Thousand and One Gems of Poetry (1867) and Mrs. Valentine’s Gems of National Poetry (1881). Ten years later Bohn’s four-volume Standard Library of British Poets omitted Southey but did include Charlotte Smith and Robert Bloomfi eld. On the threshold of the new century Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) included only ‘My Days among the Dead’ and mis- indexed it (as did the many later impressions of this book). The English Parnassus: An Anthology of Longer Poems (1909), in which one might expect Southey to have fared better, contained nothing by him – nor did Robert Southey’s Career 3 Sir Henry Newbolt’s Book of Verse Chosen for Students at Home and Abroad (1922). Southey did not survive in Immortal Verse, published at New York in 1929; he wasn’t selected for The Path to Parnassus: An Anthology for Schools (1940) or for the Oxford schoolbook of Fifteen Poets (1941). Even The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets (1927) ignored him. Helen Gardner left Southey out of her New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972), so did Christopher Ricks’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1999). Humphrey Milford’s Oxford Book of English Verse of the Romantic Period (1928) contained ‘The Battle of Blenheim’, ‘The Old Woman of Berkeley’, ‘Inchcape Rock’, ‘God’s Judgement on a Wicked Bishop’, ‘My Days among the Dead’, and extracts from Kehama; at the other end of the century Jerome McGann’s New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993) admitted just one complete poem by Southey, ‘The Widow’, with extracts from Thalaba and Kehama. It is understandable, then, that for many years Southey’s reputation rested to some extent upon ideas of unjust neglect. ‘[S]o far, posterity has left Robert Southey severely alone’, judged James Darmesteter in 1896, a comment that does not quite square with Southey’s patchy representation in anthologies or Marilyn Butler’s contention, nearly a century later, that Southey is ‘no longer currently much read’.5 His scanty presence in Victorian anthologies shows that a few of his poems were accessible, and in his own time his books had sold well: Roderick had a print run of 7,000 copies (1814–26); Joan of Arc, 6,000 (1796–1806); Thalaba, 3,500 (1801–21); Madoc, 3,000 (1805-24); and The Curse of Kehama, 1,250 (1810–11).6 ‘The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ (1816) appeared by 10 May 1816 in a fi rst edition of 2,000 copies, and had sold 1,500 by 20 May.7 His biographies of Nelson and Wesley drew numerous readers in the nineteenth century, and references to him in the TLS archive point to twentieth-century awareness with a gathering of critical and editorial at- tention in recent years. When Butler’s Romantics Rebels and Reactionaries appeared in 1981, Southey’s poetry had been discussed at length in Mary Jacobus’s Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1976), in Jonathan Wordsworth’s Music of Humanity (1969), and, ear- lier, in major twentieth-century studies and editions by Geoffrey Carnall, Jack Simmons, Kenneth Curry and William Haller. Southey studies since 1981 have built upon these foundations, most notably in the distinguished editorial work on his poetry and letters by Lynda Pratt and Tim Fulford, 4 Nicholas Roe in biographies by Mark Storey and Bill Speck, and critical studies such as Christopher J. P. Smith’s A Quest for Home (1997) and David Fairer’s Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (2009). Seen in a long perspective Southey’s representation in literary-critical studies has been hindered by the issue of how we ‘read’ Southey and other poets who don’t fi t more established paradigms of what Romantic poets are. Often it has been stalled by a ‘general refusal to look at the poetry it- self’, a refusal that has reinforced the myth of neglect.8 This phenomenon, established early, is one of the oddities of his career and subsequent recep- tion. At the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, Southey’s position appeared hopeless, ‘no longer read save in a few facile ballads’, according to James Darmesteter.9 ‘He worked early and late, well and ill’, a rueful Mrs Oliphant told her readers, ‘[b]ut he did not get the prize from heaven. In his excellence he was left low down in the lower room, and no one said to him, “Come up higher”’. David Rannie put the case that ‘[n]o great English writer calls out more urgently for reconsideration than Southey’, yet in the mid-twentieth century Henry Dyson and John Butt observed that ‘[no] attempt has ever been made to collect all Southey’s numerous writings. Nor would such an attempt be valuable’.10 ‘[U]rgent for reconsideration . [n]or would such an attempt be valuable’: these two comments, separated by some thirty years, alert us to a persistent equivocation over Southey’s merits – his ‘good-bad poetry’, as David Bromwich has described it.11 The tendency had been evident in William Taylor’s review of Thalaba in December 1803: ‘Perhaps no work of art so imperfect ever announced such power in the artist – perhaps no artist so powerful ever rested his fame on so imperfect a production – as Thalaba . it leaves a strong, but a confused and confusing impres- sion’.12 If we move forward two hundred years, Seamus Perry’s account of Southey’s bad-good poetry presents a similar outline of powerful imperfection: [Southey’s] epics – those enormous, hectic combinations of extremes – are mostly not what you would consider good poetry, but that might tell us as much about what we ordinarily call good poetry as it does about Southey’s merits; and it’s true that what’s best about these poems, their broad narrative push and gaudy weirdness, is not the sort of thing that modern practitioners of Eng. Lit. have much to say about. On Robert Southey’s Career 5 the other hand, no amount of critical relativism is likely to persuade many readers that language is being used in particularly deft or subtle ways.13 Are modern readers, confused by Southey as Taylor had been, simply unable to credit what’s ‘best’ in his poems? At St Andrews University a diligent nineteenth-century reader of the fi rst edition of Roderick pencilled above the endnotes: ‘Southey’s notes are always more interesting than his poetry! Where lies the fault? In the poet or in the readers?’ It’s a bright question, for when other students read the poem their marginal comments were praising: ‘eloquent’, ‘sublime’, ‘well-done’, ‘Good Bob’, ‘natural’, ‘good description’, ‘graphic’, ‘beautiful indeed worthy of Byron’.