Southey’s Forms of Experiment

Abstract

A good part of Chapter 3 of Biographia Literaria is spent defending, and analysing, the works of Robert Southey. Apart from the intrinsic interest of the case, the subject of Southey also enables Coleridge to pursue his wider argument with the periodical reviewers, who had been severe on Southey’s minor works especially, and had used the public- ation of Thalaba to launch an attack on the ‘new school’ of poetry, in which Coleridge was himself enrolled, with what he considered to have been lastingly detrimental effects on the reception of his own writings. In addition, the appearance of Southey acts as a dress- rehearsal for the much weightier drama that is to be played out, in later chapters of the Biographia, with Wordsworth and on questions of poetic diction and common language. Altogether, then, Chapter 3 is a nice exercise in owning a friend and keeping him at a distance. In the course of the discussion, Coleridge excuses the ‘careless lines’ and ‘inequality’ in Southey’s early output as the ‘faults’ of ‘a young and rapid writer’, while accusing his ‘critics’ of ‘a party spirit to aggravate’ those faults, as the by-products of a poet who was zealous ‘for a cause, which he deemed that of liberty’ (I, 55–6).¹