Believing in Form and Forms of Belief: The Case of Robert Southey

Abstract

Southey is a name to most readers but few read him. At the moment there seem to be three suggested approaches to his writings. The first is present in Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology,1 and has been eloquently urged by his most recent critic Christopher Smith.² The latter briefly reviews the first version of Madoc but ignores the Eastern epics and Roderick, the Last of the Goths because he argues, like Grigson, that we should pay particular attention to Southey’s slighter poems — his parodies, ballads and domestic pieces. The other two approaches are associated with Marilyn Butler. She argues, first, for the importance of reading Southey’s long poems in order to understand the better-known Romantics for the ‘poets we have installed as canonical look more interesting individually, and far more understandable as groups, when we restore some of their lost peers’ and Southey is a particularly helpful case of this.³ She argues, secondly, as we might expect, for the political subtext of his Eastern epics. She is certainly right that Southey’s major epics do throw real light on the poetry of Byron and Shelley in particular but my focus is of a different kind. In what sense, if any, do Southey’s long poems embody religious forms of insight in their poetic processes and what relation does this have to their formal unity — that is to say to their ability to be read as such?