SOURCE: “Days Among the Dead: Prose Writings,” in Robert Southey, Twayne, 1977, pp. 158-80.

In the following essay, Bernhardt-Kabisch discusses Southey's prose writings, contending that these works are superior to Southey's poetry.

By common opinion, Southey's prose is greatly superior to his poetry. Contemporaries deemed it exemplary, and more recent critics have tended to agree. In fact, Southey did much to free English prose from the labored solemnity of the school of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke and to develop a medium suited to scholarly exposition, practical controversy, and unadorned narrative—a style, as he put it, pregnant with meaning yet “plain as a Doric building” ([The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, hereafter] Life, II, 133). Plainness, however, is not always a virtue; and, if Southey's prose is, as Coleridge said, a model of transparency and down-to-earth functionalism, it is also quite unpoetic and justifies Byron's quip about the Laureate's...