Robert Southey Robert Southey Robert Southey ( or (12 August 1774 – 21 March 1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the Lake Poets along with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and England's Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 until his death in 1843. Although his fame has been eclipsed by that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, his verse still enjoys some popularity. Southey was also 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
The White Doe of Rylstone the reviewers were at best lukewarm. The "Eclectic Review" did concede that "where he comes in contact with the ordinary sympathies of human nature, no living poet leaves so strongly the impression of a master genius", but Francis Jeffrey of the "Edinburgh Review", a long-time foe of the Lake Poets, thought it had "the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume". Coleridge, by then in a state of uneasy reconciliation with Wordsworth, quoted a passage from "The White Doe" in his "Biographia Literaria", praising its beauty and imaginative power. John Ruskin, in