Dictionary of Literary Biography on Robert Anderson

To the issue of the Quarterly Review published in July 1814, Robert Southey contributed a twenty-four-page review of the twenty-one volumes of Alexander Chalmers's edition of The Works of the English Poets (1810). Southey's review was severe and detailed, charging Chalmers with many sins of omission and commission. Southey naturally saw Chalmers's volumes as an attempt to succeed and replace A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (1792-1795; 1807), which Robert Anderson had edited. Of the relative merits of the two editors Southey had no doubts. Indeed, it is with a comparison between Anderson and Chalmers that Southey concludes his damning review: "It is scarcely possible to conceive two persons performing the same work with feelings more different than Dr. Anderson and Mr. Chalmers. The former a thorough lover of poetry, indulgent to the artist for the sake of the art: the latter a thorough-paced professional critic, so entirely ignorant of his subject as to fancy that [Richard] Glover used no trochees in his verse, and to class [Matthew] Prior, [Thomas] Gray, and [Mark] Akenside in the school of [Edmund] Spenser, and talk of their writings in the Spenserian stanza!" Southey takes the opportunity to pay a generous tribute to Anderson and to point to the important contribution Anderson's magnum opus has made to the history of English literature and to the understanding of that history:

To good old Dr.

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Robert Anderson biography

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