Topic: Robert Southey

Robert Southey (12 August 1774 – 21 March 1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843. Although his fame tends to be eclipsed by that of his contemporaries and friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey's verse enjoys enduring popularity. Moreover, he was a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, essay writer, historian and biographer. His biographies include the life and works of John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson. The latter has rarely been out of print since its publication in 1813 and was adapted for the screen in the 1926 British film, Nelson. He was also a renowned Portuguese and Spanish scholar, translating a number of works of those two countries into English and writing both a History of Brazil (part of his planned History of Portugal which was never completed) and a History of the Peninsular War. Perhaps his most enduring contribution to literary history is the immortal children's classic, The Story of the Three Bears, the original Goldilocks story, which first saw print in 1834 in Southey's novel, The Doctor.

Robert Southey was born in Wine Street, Bristol, England, to Thomas Southey and Margaret Hill and educated at Westminster School, London, (from which he was expelled for writing a magazine article in The Flagellant condemning flogging) and Balliol College, Oxford (of his time at Oxford – before the era of Benjamin Jowett and the dramatic raising of standards that over the previous century had become somewhat lax – Southey was later to say "All I learnt was a little swimming ... and a little boating."). After experimenting with a writing partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, most notably with the joint composition of The Fall of Robespierre, he published his first collection of poems in 1794.

The same year, he, Coleridge and a few others discussed setting up an idealistic community in America ("pantisocracy"):