Robert Southey

Robert Southey, an English Romantic poet, served as Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Southey, like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, started out as a radical but gradually grew more conservative as he came to admire Britain and its institutions. Other romantics, including Byron, accused him of siding with the establishment for financial and social reasons. He is best known for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of "Goldilocks and the...See more

Robert Southey, an English Romantic poet, served as Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Southey, like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, started out as a radical but gradually grew more conservative as he came to admire Britain and its institutions. Other romantics, including Byron, accused him of siding with the establishment for financial and social reasons. He is best known for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears". Robert Southey was born in Wine Street, Bristol, to parents Robert Southey and Margaret Hill. He attended Westminster School in London (where he was expelled for authoring an essay in The Flagellant, a periodical he founded that attributed the creation of flogging to the Devil), as well as Balliol College in Oxford. Southey arrived at the University of Oxford with "a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon . He subsequently stated of Oxford, "All I learnt was a little swimming and a little boating". See less