Abstract
Dorothy Wordsworth's comments point to one of the central difficulties in thinking about, let alone writing about, Robert Southey. Southey's belief in this view of things presents, and certainly a biographer — as it did his contemporaries — with strange contradictions and contrarieties. Southey, alas, never achieved that humble and humbling recognition of true insight brought to bear by Jonson on the death of his first son: Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say doth lieBen Jonson, his best piece of poetry. For a man who expected, even when young, that later generations would take a keen interest in his life and work, Southey would have been disappointed at his virtual eclipse by the planetary movements of posterity. The weight of what Thomson calls the 'mighty dead' lies heavily on the Romantics, more so, in fact, than Southey seems to imply.
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