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Southey's Specimens of the Later English Poets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Raymond D. Havens
Raymond D. Havens*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

On February 23, 1804, shortly after he had settled in the lake country, Southey wrote John May:

Ellis's “Specimens of the early English Poets” … has sold very successfully, and I am about to publish a supplementary or companion work. There will be a preliminary essay … then, upon Ellis's plan, and beginning where he leaves off, a brief biographical notice of every English poet from that time, with the best or most characteristic specimen of his works, arranging the authors chronologically, and bringing them down to the present time, exclusive only of living authors. I include every poet, good, bad, and indifferent, who had any reputation, or produced any effect in his day… . This is all easy work … the copying part shall all be done by some bookseller's amanuensis.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 60 , Issue 4-Part1 , December 1945 , pp. 1066 - 1079
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945

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References

1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Southey's letters are taken from J. W. Warter's Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey (1856). Letters in Charles Cuthbert Southey's unsatisfactory Life and Correspondence of his father (1849-50) are designated (LC).

2 Letters of January 26 and February 16, 1804 (LC).

3 Letters to Miss Barker and May 7 and to Coleridge of March 14 (LC); cf. letters to Bedford of March 31 (LC) and April 23 (LC).

4 Letter to John Rickman of June 6, 1804 (LC).

5 Letter to Charles Danvers of May 13, 1806.

6 To Bedford, Sept. 20-17 [27?], 1806.

7 To Bedford, February 2, 1807.

8 Southey wrote Danvers on March 2 that they were published but in his letter to Bedford of March 14 he said: “I write by this post to Longman, ordering the following cancels… .” On March 30 he informed John May, “I sent you the Specimens” (LC). It is likely that the dates of some of these letters are wrong—that for June 6, 1804, is printed “June 6, 1802” (LC).

9 The title-page the poet wrote on a sheet 6½ × 8¼ inches, at the bottom of which he added “the proofs of the Preface must be sent to me.” Some of the sheets entirely in Bedford's hand are 4$f78 × 7½ inches.

10 I have what Southey wrote for Cunningham, Kenrick, and Langhorne, but as this is entirely different from the published accounts, the latter were almost certainly composed by Bedford.

11 Letter to Charles Danvers of March 2, 1807.

12 Letter to Bedford of March 14, 1807.

13 Letters to C. W. W. Wynn, June 11, 1807, and to John May, December 16, 1807. The Dictionary of National Biography says that the work was reprinted in 1811, but I have found no evidence of this edition.

14 Preface to Southey's Select Works of the British Poets (1831).

15 See footnote 10 above.

16 Southey's copy of Newcomb's Last Judgement of Men and Angels, which is here termed “a wretched poem,” is in the Library of Congress.

17 For Pope both men wrote preliminary notices, neither of which was printed. Southey's is as follows: “The contempt which Pope expressed for Kings is well known, but the contempt which the King expressed for him is perhaps not so well. George 2. when he heard him praised used pettishly to exclaim ‘vy does dat man fool away his time in verze for? vy does not he write pross, vich every body understands?‘”

18 As does the published notice of Bampfylde.

19 Southey may have been able to correct some of these, but both indexes omit Susanna Centlivre and misspell Jeffreys; the first omits Tate, spells Gay, “Gray,” and has many incorrect dates, several of which are obvious misprints; the second omits Thomas Cole and frequently gives wrong page references. In the account of John Ellis the birth date is seven years later than the death date; and Wilkie's death (1772) is given in the index as 1762 and in the preliminary notice a 1672, 49 years before his birth! There are a number of misprints such as “her” for “he” (i. 86), “Whycherly” for “Wycherley” (i. 170), “has” for “have” (i. 444), “Werter” for “Winter” (i. 361), “intellects … they” for “intellect … it” (iii. 217), “Love” for “Lover” (iii. 465), “Fashion and Satire” for “Fashion a Satire” (ib.), “twenty” for “seventy” (iii. 340), “& 2” omitted (ib.); and Pope's “Epistle to Miss Bount with the Works of Voiture” is quoted instead of his “Epistle to Miss Blount on her Leaving the Town.” In many cases Southey left the date of the author's birth for Bedford to fill in with the aid of London libraries; but this he failed to do, with the result that in such cases if the place of birth has been noted it was printed as the place of death.

“The omissions,” Southey complained to Bedford in a letter of March 14, 1807, “are so very numerous” that he wanted to publish a supplementary volume; and he named Burns and Russel as notable instances. “Your biographies,” he added, “are in general good… . I seriously disapprove of nothing, except the articles on Chatterton and Chesterfield.”

20 Preface, p. vi.

21 Southey apologized for “inserting so well-known a poem as the Splendid Shilling” and added “it is the only one among his works short enough to be inserted.” The exclusion of extracts from long poems—the passages from Wilkie's Epigoniad, Dodd's Thoughts in Prison, and Moses Browne's Essay on the Universe are not Southey's selection—means that authors like Thomson and Young are inadequately represented.

22 He had called The Ancient Mariner “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity … a poem of little merit” (Critical Review, xxiv [Oct. 1798], 201), and in the preface to the Specimens he declared, “Donne could never have become a Poet” (p. xxiv), whereas “Wither and Quarles deserve especial mention” among the minor poets of the first half of the seventeenth century (p. xxvi). In this account of Hughes he remarked that the Siege of Damascus “ranks” its author “above all his contemporary dramatists,” and he chose more poems and poems that fill more pages from Aaron Hill than from almost any other writer.

23 The poems mentioned are those listed in the manuscript in Southey's handwriting. The selections published often differ from these.

24 He wrote to Coleridge March 14, 1804 (LC), that the Specimens would be “a very curious and useful book,” and complained to Bedford March 14, 1807, of the omission of his “skit upon Leonidas, which was one of the most curious things in the book.” To the second volume he appended a quotation from Edward Phillips which, after a plea for some record of every “poetical volume” however worthless, continues: “In works of this nature … we write as well to the inquisitive as the judicious, to the curious as the critic.” In his Works of the British Poets from Chaucer to Jonson (1831) he included Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry as “one of the most curious books in our language” (p. 143).

25 “Few Poets,” Southey continued, “seem to have possessed so quick & observing an eye,” a comment that suggests Wordsworth rather than Johnson.

26 Letter to Bedford of January 2, 1807.

27 Jacob Zeitlin, Select Prose of Robert Southey (New York, 1916), pp. 42, 71.

28 Logan Pearsall Smith, A Treasury of English Aphorisms (Boston, 1928), p. 28.

29 Compare the observation on Edward Moore: “Editor of the World, which is often published, though perhaps not often read, & author of the Foundling.” In his account of Watts Southey makes a Johnsonian comment on a remark attributed to Johnson: “The reply is to be imputed more to his wit than to his intolerance.”

30 The words in italics are crossed out in the manuscript and were not printed. Compare the comment on the Jacobite, William Meston: “His Poems have been often printed in Scotland. They will now perish with the family of the Stuarts.” See also James Graeme.

31 Of Richard Leveridge; changed by Bedford to “This man was a singer on the stage.”

32 Account of William Hamilton.

33 The late Jacob Zeitlin in Notes and Queries for April, 1918, presented good reasons for believing that the review of Anderson's British Poets in the Critical Review for January, 1799, was by Southey, since it contains similarities of thought and expression to the preface to the Specimens. A small point, not mentioned by Zeitlin, which bears out his contention is that the Specimens assert and the review implies that James Graeme “is indebted to the partial friendship of Dr. Anderson for a place among the English Poets.” The review and the Specimens are also connected in that when citing titles of poems to be included in his anthology Southey gave the volume and page in Anderson's collection for all poems found in it.