Contribution of Robert Southey

A contemporary of the great poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Robert Southey is one of the best known of the unread poets; that is, his name is better known than the work he produced. While his work leans towards the interspection, skepticism, and symbolism that characterize the period; Southey never fully came to frustation as a Romantic poet. He served as Poet Laureate of England for thirty years. He was one of the Lake poets. Southey was a prolific writer of histories, biographies and essays, many of which are considered superior to his often pedestrian verse.
Southey was equally concerned about the state of contemporary culture and his own very public poetic and linguistic experiments of the mid and late 1790s had helped to pave the way for Lyrical Ballads. Southey's reputation during his lifetime was largely established by his epics.
 Thalaba,the Destroyer, Madoc, and The Curse of Kehama, all set in exotic location. Southey's epic ambitions began early and eventually resulted in three poems: Joan of Arc, Madoc and Rodrick, the Last of the Goths. He was not the first or only poet of the romantic period to produce an epic but he was one of the most publicly controversial and confrontational. One of his most treasured contribution to the literature however, is his Children's fable 'The Story of the Three Bears'.
 Criticism to Southey's controversial epic has tended to concrete on its relationship to his politics. Despite the general agreement that Wordsworth and Coleridge far outshine Southey creatively, the poet is increasingly considered an important figure of the Romantic period.

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