A Quest for Home

This study challenges the way that Robert Southey (1774-1843) has been marginalized by scholars of Romanticism, despite recent attempts to re-engage with his work by writers such as Marilyn Butler. The focus is on key themes and leitmotifs within certain Southeyan text from within approximately the period 1793-1805. Often using single representative poems, the author has drawn a full scholarly picture of quthorial traces and contemporary historical influences and events, be they poetical or political. Southey's marginalized writing shows how he was usually at the forefront of literary fashion and acted as both literary pioneer and prompt for his contemporaries. His experiments with poetic form and subject are seen by many as being essential factors in the shaping of other Romantic projects in the late 1790s and early 1800s.