Poems by Robert Southey. Chosen and arranged by Edward Dowden

Not long after becoming poet laureate (some say that Sir Walter Scott played a significant role in the selection process), this English poet and writer, Southey, got entangled in a bitter literary feud with Lord Byron. Byron dedicated his satirical work on hypocrisy, Don Juan, to Southey, apparently out of spite. It is said that after leaving Balliol College at Oxford to join Samuel Taylor Coleridge in their agricultural utopian dream (aka, pantisocracy), Southey soon lost interest and the dream collapsed. He was more known for his gifted prose, namely in The Fall of Robespierre (1794), which he wrote with Cooleridge, and Life of Nelson (1813), than his gifted epic poetry (see Joan of Arc).