| Home | Menu | Poems | Poets | Reading | Theme | Biography | Articles | Photo | Dictionary | Chat | Video | Shop | Extra | Jokes | Games | Science | Bio | বাংলা

US Poet J.D. McClatchy 1945

J. D. "Sandy" McClatchy (born 1945) is an American poet and literary critic. He is editor of the Yale Review and president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

McClatchy was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1945. He was educated at Georgetown and Yale, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1974. He lives in Stonington, Connecticut and New York. His partner is graphic designer Chip Kidd.

Career

McClatchy is an adjunct professor at Yale University and editor of the Yale Review. He also edits the "Voice of the Poet" series for Random House AudioBooks.

His book Hazmat (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) was nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. He has written texts for musical settings, including eight opera libretti, for such composers as Elliot Goldenthal, Daron Hagen, Lowell Liebermann, Lorin Maazel, Tobias Picker, Ned Rorem, Bruce Saylor, and William Schuman. His honors include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1991). He has also been one of the New York Public Literary Lions, and received the 2000 Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award.

In 1999, he was elected into the membership of The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in January 2009 he was elected president. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1987), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets (1991). He served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1996 until 2003.

With UCLA professor and poet Stephen Yenser, McClatchy serves as co-executor for the literary estate of James Merrill (1926–1995).

Bibliography

Poetry
  • Seven Mozart Librettos: A Verse Translation (W.W. Norton 2010)
  • Mercury Dressing: Poems (Knopf, 2009)
  • Division of Spoils: Selected Poems (Arc, 2003)
  • Hazmat, Alfred A. Knopf: Random House, 96 pages, April 2004
  • Ten Commandments, Random House, Inc., 120 pages, December 1999
  • The Rest of the Way (Knopf, 1992).
  • Stars Principal (Macmillan,1986).
  • Scenes from Another Life (Braziller,1981).

Criticism

  • American Writers at Home, Photographs by Erica Lennard, Library of America, 240 pages, October 2004
  • Twenty Questions, Columbia University Press, 200 pages February 1998
  • White Paper (Columbia UP, 1989).

As Editor

  • The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, Random House, Inc, 654 pages, May 1996
  • Christmas Poems, Edited by John Hollander and J. D. McClatchy, Random House, Inc , cloth , 256 pages, October 1999
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings (Library of America), Library of America, 854 pages, August 2000
  • Bright Pages: Yale Writers, 1701–2001, Yale University Press, 540 pages, April 2001
  • Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems, Random House, Inc, 256 pages,May 2001
  • Poems of the Sea, Random House, Inc, 256 pages, November 2001
  • Collected Poems by James Merrill, Edited by Stephen Yenser and J. D. McClatchy, Alfred A. Knopf: Random House, 912 pages, November 2002
  • The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Second Edition,Vintage Books: Random House, 736 pages, April 2003
  • Allen Ginsberg: The Voice of the Poet, Random House, Inc, March 2004
  • Frank O'Hara: The Voice of the Poet, Random House, Inc., March 2004
  • W.H. Auden: The Voice of the Poet, Random House, Inc., March 2004
  • Horace, the Odes: New Translations by Contemporary Poets by Horace, Edited by J. D. McClatchy and Nicholas Jenkins, Princeton University Press, 320 pages, April 2005
  • Poets of the Civil War, Library of America, 250 pages, April 2005
  • The Changing Light at Sandover: A Poem by James Merrill, Edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, Alfred A. Knopf: Random House, 608 pages February 2006

US Poet Donald Justice 1925 - 2004

Donald Justice (August 12, 1925 - August 6, 2004) was an American poet and teacher of writing. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr has written, "In most ways, Justice was no different from any number of solid, quiet older writers devoted to traditional short poems. But he was different in one important sense: sometimes his poems weren't just good; they were great. They were great in the way that Elizabeth Bishop's poems were great, or Thom Gunn's or Philip Larkin's. They were great in the way that tells us what poetry used to be, and is, and will be."

Justice grew up in Florida, and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Miami in 1945. He received an M.A. from the University of North Carolina in 1947, studied for a time at Stanford University, and ultimately earned a doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1954. He went on to teach for many years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the nation's first graduate program in creative writing. He also taught at Syracuse University, the University of California at Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Justice published thirteen collections of his poetry. The first collection, The Summer Anniversaries, was the winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize given by the Academy of American Poets in 1961; Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1996.

His honors also included grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. His Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award in 2004. Justice was also a National Book Award Finalist in 1961, 1974, and 1995.

In his obituary, Andrew Rosenheim notes that Justice "was a legendary teacher, and despite his own Formalist reputation influenced a wide range of younger writers - his students included Mark Strand, Rita Dove, James Tate, Jorie Graham and the novelist John Irving". His student and later colleague Marvin Bell said in a reminiscence, "As a teacher, Don chose always to be on the side of the poem, defending it from half-baked attacks by students anxious to defend their own turf. While he had firm preferences in private, as a teacher Don defended all turfs. He had little use for poetic theory..."

Of Justice's accomplishments as a poet, his former student, the poet and critic Tad Richards, noted that, "Donald Justice is likely to be remembered as a poet who gave his age a quiet but compelling insight into loss and distance, and who set a standard for craftsmanship, attention to detail, and subtleties of rhythm."

Justice's work was the subject of the 1998 volume Certain Solitudes: On The Poetry of Donald Justice, which is a collection of essays edited by Dana Gioia and William Logan.

Published work

Poetry Collections

  • The Old Bachelor and Other Poems (Pandanus Press, Miami, FL), 1951.
  • The Summer Anniversaries (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT), 1960; revised edition (University Press of New England, Hanover, NH), 1981.
  • A Local Storm (Stone Wall Press, Iowa City, IA, 1963).
  • Night Light (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1967); revised edition (University Press of New England, Hanover, NH, 1981).
  • Sixteen Poems (Stone Wall Press, Iowa City, IA, 1970).
  • From a Notebook (Seamark Press, Iowa City, IA, 1971).
  • Departures (Atheneum, New York, NY, 1973).
  • Selected Poems (Atheneum, New York, NY, 1979).
  • Tremayne (Windhover Press, Iowa City, IA, 1984).
  • The Sunset Maker (Anvil Press Poetry, 1987). ISBN 978-0856461958.
  • A Donald Justice Reader (Middlebury, 1991). ISBN 978-0874516265.
  • New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 1995). ISBN 978-0679441731.
  • Orpheus Hesitated beside the Black River: Poems, 1952-1997 (Anvil Press Poetry, London, England), 1998.
  • Collected Poems (Knopf, 2004). ISBN 978-1400042395 .

Essay and interview collections

  • Oblivion: On Writers and Writing, 1998
  • Platonic Scripts, 1984

Edited volumes

Justice edited posthumous selections of unpublished poetry for four poets: Weldon Kees, Henri Coulette, Raeburn Miller, and Joe Bolton.

  • Aspel, Alexander (1965). Aspel, Alexander; Justice, Donald. eds. Contemporary French Poetry: Fourteen Witnesses after Man's Fate. University of Michigan Press.
  • Kees, Weldon; Wojahn, David (2003). Justice, Donald. ed. The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Third Edition). Bison Books. ISBN 978-0803278097. The first edition of this collection was published in 1960.
  • Coulette, Henri (1990). Justice, Donald; Mezey, Robert. eds. Collected Poems of Henri Coulette. University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1557281456.
  • Miller, Raeburn; Justice, Donald (1994). Justice, Donald; Mackin, Cooper R.; Olson, Richard D.. eds. The Comma after Love: Selected Poems of Raeburn Miller. University of Akron Press. ISBN 978-1884836039.
  • Bolton, Joe (1999). Justice, Donald. ed. Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982-1990. ISBN 978-1557285584.

Libretti

  • The Young God - A Vaudeville (opera by Edward Miller), 1969
  • The Death of Lincoln: an opera by Edwin London on an original libretto by Donald Justice, 1988

See also

  • Donald Justice Poetry Prize
  • American poetry

US Poet Katharine Lee Bates 1859 - 1929

Katharine Lee Bates (August 12, 1859 – March 28, 1929) was an American songwriter. She is remembered as the author of the words to the anthem "America the Beautiful". She popularized "Mrs. Santa Claus" through her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride (1889).

Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Congregational pastor. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1880 and for many years was a professor of English literature at Wellesley. While teaching there, she was elected a member of the newly formed Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences because of her interest in history and politics, which she had also studied.

Relationship with Katharine Coman

Bates lived in Wellesley with Katharine Coman, who was a history and political economy teacher and founder of the Wellesley College school Economics department. The pair lived together for twenty-five years until Coman's death in 1915. It is debated whether their relationship was an intimate lesbian relationship as different sources maintain or platonic (sometimes called a "Boston marriage") as the local historical society of her birthplace maintains. In the years following Coman's death, Bates wrote Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance, to Katharine Coman. Almost all the poems there contained refer to the relationship between Bates and Coman.

America the Beautiful

The first draft of "America the Beautiful" was hastily jotted down in a notebook during the summer of 1893, which Bates spent teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Later she remembered:

One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.

The words to her only famous poem first appeared in print in The Congregationalist, a weekly journal, for Independence Day, 1895. The poem reached a wider audience when her revised version was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 19, 1904. Her final expanded version was written in 1913.

The hymn has been sung to several tunes, but the familiar one used by Ray Charles is by Samuel A. Ward (1847–1903), written for his hymn "Materna" (1882).

Other writings, honors, and death

Cover of an early edition of Goody Santa Claus

Bates was a prolific author of many volumes of poetry, travel books, and children's books. She popularized Mrs. Claus in her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride from the collection Sunshine and other Verses for Children (1889).

Her family home on Falmouth's Main Street is preserved by the Falmouth Historical Society. There is also a street named in her honor, "Katharine Lee Bates Road" in Falmouth. Bates lived as an adult on Centre Street in Newton, Massachusetts. A historic plaque marks the site of her home.

Bates has two schools named in her honor, the Katharine Lee Bates Elementary School, located on Elmwood Road in Wellesley, Massachusetts and the Katharine Lee Bates Elementary School, located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The latter was founded in 1957.

Bates died in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on March 28, 1929, aged 69, and is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery at Falmouth. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.

Works

  • (Editor) The Wedding Day Book, Lothrop (Boston, MA), 1882, published as The Wedding-Day Book, with the Congratulations of the Poets, Lothrop (Boston, MA), 1895.
  • The College Beautiful, and Other Poems, Houghton (Cambridge, MA), 1887.
  • (Editor) Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1889.
  • Rose and Thorn, Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society (Boston, MA), 1889.
  • (Editor) Ballad Book, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1890, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, NY), 1969.
  • Hermit Island, Lothrop (Boston, MA), 1890.
  • Sunshine, and Other Verses for Children, Wellesley Alumnae (Boston, MA), 1890.
  • The English Religious Drama, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1893, reprinted, Kennikat Press (Port Washington, NY), 1966.
  • (Editor) Shakespeare's Comedy of The Merchant of Venice, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1894.
  • (Editor) Shakespeare's Comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1895.
  • (Editor) Shakespeare's Comedy of As You Like It, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1896.
  • (Compiler) Browning Studies: Bibliography, Robinson (Boston, MA), 1896.
  • (Editor) Stories from the Chap-Book, Stone (Chicago, IL), 1896.
  • (Compiler with Lydia Boker Godfrey) English Drama: A Working Basis, Robinson(Boston, MA), 1896, enlarged as Shakespeare: Selective Bibliography and Biographical Notes, compiled by Bates and Lilla Weed, Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA), 1913.
  • American Literature, Chautauqua Press (New York, NY), 1897.
  • Spanish Highways and Byways, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1900.
  • (Editor) Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, Silver, Burdett, (New York, NY), 1902.
  • (Editor and author of introduction) The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, fourteen volumes, Crowell (New York, NY), 1902.
  • (Editor) Hamilton Wright Mabie, Norse Stories Retold from the Eddas, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1902.
  • (Compiler with Katharine Coman) English History Told by English Poets, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1902, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, NY), 1969.
  • (As James Lincoln) Relishes of Rhyme, Richard G. Badger (Boston, MA), 1903.
  • (Editor) The Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary, Crowell (New York, NY), 1903.
  • (Editor) John Ruskin, The King of the Golden River; or, the Black Brothers: A Legend of Stiria, illustrated by John C. Johansen, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1903.
  • (Editor) Tennyson's The Princess, American Book Co. (New York, NY), 1904.
  • (Editor) Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette, Lancelot and Elaine, The Passing of Arthur, Sibley (Boston, MA), 1905.
  • (Author of introduction) Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches, Crowell (New York, NY), 1906.
  • From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England, photographs by Katharine Coman, Crowell (New York, NY), 1907.
  • (Translator, with Cornelia Frances Bates) Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Romantic Legends of Spain, Crowell (New York), 1909, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, NY), 1971.
  • The Story of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1909.
  • America the Beautiful, and Other Poems, Crowell (New York, NY), 1911.
  • (Compiler and editor) The New Irish Drama, Drama League of America (Chicago, IL), 1911.
  • In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael, Dutton (New York, NY), 1913.
  • Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, Retold by Katharine Lee Bates, illustrated by Angus MacDonall, color plates by Milo Winter, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1914.
  • Fairy Gold, Dutton, (New York, NY), 1916.
  • (Author of introduction) Helen Sanborn, Anne of Brittany, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard (Boston, MA), 1917.
  • (Editor) Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and the Faire Maide of the West, Heath (Boston, MA), 1917.
  • The Retinue, and Other Poems, Dutton (New York, NY), 1918.
  • Sigurd Our Golden Collie, and Other Comrades of the Road, Dutton (New York, NY), 1919.
  • (Editor) Once Upon a Time; A Book of Old-Time Fairy Tales, illustrated by Margaret Evans Price, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1921.
  • Yellow Clover, A Book of Remembrance, Dutton (New York, NY), 1922.
  • Little Robin Stay-Behind, and Other Plays in Verse for Children, Woman's Press (New York, NY), 1923.
  • The Pilgrim Ship, Woman's Press (New York, NY), 1926.
  • (Editor) Tom Thumb and Other Old-Time Fairy Tales, illustrated by Price, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1926.
  • America the Dream, Crowell (New York, NY), 1930.
  • An Autobiography, in Brief, of Katharine Lee Bates, Enterprise Press (Falmouth, MA), 1930.
  • Selected Poems of Katharine Lee Bates, edited by Marion Pelton Guild, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1930.
  • (Author of introduction) Helen Corke, The World's Family, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1930.
  • (Editor) Jack the Giant-Killer, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1937.
  • (Editor) Jack and the Beanstalk; also Toads and Diamonds, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1937.
  • America the Beautiful, illustrated by Neil Waldman, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1993.
  • O Beautiful For Spacious Skies, edited by Sara Jane Boyers, illustrated by Wayne Thiebaud, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 1994.

Contributor to Historic Towns of New England, edited by Lyman P. Powell, Putnam (New York, NY), 1898. Contributor to periodicals, sometimes under the pseudonym James Lincoln, including Atlantic Monthly, Congregationalist, Boston Evening Transcript, Christian Century, Contemporary Verse, Lippincott's and Delineator.

Collections of Bates's manuscripts are housed by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA; Falmouth Historical Society, Falmouth, MA; Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Wellesley College Archives, Wellesley, MA.

UK Poet Robert Southey 1774 - 1843

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 has been long eclipsed by that of his contemporaries and friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey's verse still enjoys some popularity.

Moreover, Southey 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 last 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 prose collection, The Doctor.

Robert Southey was born in Wine Street, Bristol, England, to Robert 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"):

Their wants would be simple and natural; their toil need not be such as the slaves of luxury endure; where possessions were held in common, each would work for all; in their cottages the best books would have a place; literature and science, bathed anew in the invigorating stream of life and nature, could not but rise reanimated and purified. Each young man should take to himself a mild and lovely woman for his wife; it would be her part to prepare their innocent food, and tend their hardy and beautiful race.

Later iterations of the plan moved the commune to Wales, but Southey was later the first of the group to reject the idea as unworkable.

In 1799, both Southey and Coleridge were involved with early experiments with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Experiments were performed by Cornish scientist Humphry Davy.

Southey's wife, Edith Fricker, whom he married at St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, on 14 November 1795, was the sister of Coleridge's wife, Sara Fricker. The Southeys set up home at Greta Hall, Keswick (pronounced Kezick), in the Lake District, living on a tiny income. Also living at Greta Hall with Southey and supported by him were Sara Coleridge and her three children following their abandonment by Coleridge and the widow of fellow poet Robert Lovell and her son.

In 1808 he became acquainted with Walter Savage Landor whose early work he had admired, and the two developed mutual admiration of each other's work and became close friends.

In 1808, Southey used the pseudonym Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella to write Letters From England, an account of a tour of the country supposedly from a foreigner's perspective. The book is said to contain a more accurate picture of English ways at the beginning of the nineteenth century than exists anywhere else.

From 1809, Southey contributed to the Quarterly Review, and had become so well-known by 1813 that he was appointed Poet Laureate after Walter Scott refused the post.

In 1819, through a mutual friend (John Rickman), Southey met leading civil engineer Thomas Telford and struck up a strong friendship. From mid-August to 1 October 1819, Southey accompanied Telford on an extensive tour of his engineering projects in the Scottish Highlands, keeping a diary of his observations. This was published posthumously in 1929 as Journal of a tour in Scotland in 1819. He was also a friend of the Dutch poet Willem Bilderdijk whom he met twice, in 1824 and 1826 at Bilderdijk's home in Leiden.

In 1837, Southey received a letter from Charlotte Brontë seeking his advice on some of her poems. He wrote back praising her talents but also discouraging her from writing professionally. He said "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life...". Years later, Bronte remarked to a friend that the letter was "kind and admirable; a little stringent, but it did me good".

In 1838, Edith died and Southey married Caroline Anne Bowles, also a poet. Southey's mind was giving way when he wrote a last letter to his friend Landor in 1839, but he continued to mention Landor's name when generally incapable of mentioning any one. He died on 23 March 1843 and is buried in the churchyard of Crosthwaite Church, Keswick, where he worshipped for forty years. There is a memorial to him inside the church with an epitaph written by his friend, William Wordsworth.

Many of his poems are still read by British schoolchildren, the best-known being The Inchcape Rock, God's Judgement on a Wicked Bishop, After Blenheim (possibly one of the earliest anti-war poems) and Cataract of Lodore.

As a prolific writer and commentator, Southey introduced or popularised a number of words into the English language. The term 'autobiography', for example, was first used by Southey in 1809 in the Quarterly Review in which he predicted an 'epidemical rage for autobiography', which indeed has continued to the present day. Southey is also credited with penning the popular children's nursery rhyme What are Little Boys Made of? around 1820.

  • The Fall of Robespierre (1794)
  • Joan of Arc: An Epic Poem (1796)
  • Icelandic poetry or The Edda of Sæmund (1797)
  • Poems (1797–99)
  • Letters from Spain (1797)
  • Saint Patrick's Purgatory (1798)
  • After Blenheim (1798)
  • Devil's Thoughts (1799)
  • The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them (1799)
  • Thalaba the Destroyer (1801)
  • Madoc (1805)
  • The Curse of Kehama (1810)
  • Roderick the Last of the Goths (1814)

Politics

A 1797 caricature of Southey's early radical poetry.

Although originally a radical supporter of the French Revolution, Southey followed the trajectory of fellow Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, towards conservatism. Embraced by the Tory Establishment as Poet Laureate, and from 1807 in receipt of a yearly stipend from them, he vigorously supported the Liverpool government. He argued against parliamentary reform ("the railroad to ruin with the Devil for driver"), blamed the Peterloo Massacre on the allegedly revolutionary "rabble" killed and injured by government troops, and opposed Catholic emancipation. In 1817 he privately proposed penal transportation for those guilty of "libel" or "sedition". He had in mind figures like Thomas Jonathan Wooler and William Hone, whose prosecution he urged. Such writers were guilty, he wrote in the Quarterly Review, of "inflaming the turbulent temper of the manufacturer and disturbing the quiet attachment of the peasant to those institutions under which he and his fathers have dwelt in peace." Wooler and Hone were acquitted, but the threats caused another target, William Cobbett, to emigrate temporarily to the United States.

In some respects, however, he was ahead of his time in his views on social reform. He was for example an early critic of the evils which the new factory system brought to early nineteenth-century Britain. He was appalled by the conditions of life in towns like Birmingham and Manchester and especially by the employment of children in factories and was outspoken in his criticism of these things. He sympathised with the pioneering socialist plans of Robert Owen, advocated that the state promote public works in order to maintain high employment and called for universal education.

Given his departure from radicalism, and his attempts to have former fellow travellers prosecuted, it is unsurprising that less successful contemporaries who kept the faith attacked Southey. They saw him as a selling out for money and respectability.

In 1817 Southey was confronted with the surreptitious publication of a radical play, Wat Tyler, that he had written in 1794 at the height of his radical period. This was instigated by his enemies in an attempt to embarrass the Poet Laureate and highlight his apostasy from radical poet to supporter of the Tory establishment. One of his most savage critics was William Hazlitt. In his portrait of Southey, in The Spirit of the Age, he wrote: "He wooed Liberty as a youthful lover, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride; and he has since wedded with an elderly and not very reputable lady, called Legitimacy." Southey largely ignored his critics but was forced to defend himself when William Smith, a member of Parliament, rose in the House of Commons on 14 March to attack him. In a spirited response Southey wrote an open letter to the MP, in which he explained that he had always aimed at lessening human misery and bettering the condition of all the lower classes and that he had only changed in respect of “the means by which that amelioration was to be effected”. As he put it, “that as he learnt to understand the institutions of his country, he learnt to appreciate them rightly, to love, and to revere, and to defend them.”

He was often mocked for what were seen as sycophantic odes to the king, most notably in Byron's long ironic dedication of Don Juan to Southey. In the poem Southey is dismissed as insolent, narrow and shabby. This was based both on Byron's disrespect for Southey's literary talent, and his disdain for what he perceived as Southey's hypocritical turn to conservative politics later in life.

The source of much of the animosity between the two men can be traced back to Byron’s belief that Southey had spread rumours about himself and Percy Shelley being in a "League of Incest" during their time on Lake Geneva in 1816, a claim that Southey strenuously denied.

In response, Southey attacked what he called the ‘Satanic School’ among modern poets in the preface to his poem, A Vision of Judgement, written following the death of George III. While not referring to Byron by name, this was clearly directed at Byron. Byron retaliated with The Vision of Judgment, a brilliant parody of Southey's poem.


Dry Season - Bei Dao


First it’s the wind from home
the father like a bird flying
over a river of drowsy haze
suddenly changes course
but you’re already sunk in the fog

supposing memory wakes
like the night sky in an observatory
you clip your fingernails
close the door open the door
friends are hard to recognize

until letters from the old days
completely lose their shadows
at sunset you listen closely
to a new city
built by a string quartet


Bei Dao