SOURCE: “Southey's Early Writings and the Revolution,” in The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 19, 1989, pp. 181-96.

In the following essay, Raimond argues that Southey's early poems were more important than current critics believe in initiating the era of Romanticism in poetry, discussing how Wat Tyler and Joan of Arc reflect the young poet's republican idealism and sympathies for the French Revolution.

Robert Southey's attitude towards the French Revolution is an instructive case. A staunch supporter of the Revolutionary ideals in his early years, the author of Joan of Arc and Wat Tyler was horrified by the excesses of the Terror, which, together with several other factors, led the former Radical to become strongly conservative. Even more than Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose political development was very similar, Southey was branded by his enemies as a contemptible shallow ‘turncoat’. When the hitherto unpublished anti-royal three-act play Wat Tyler was unexpectedly...