Robert Southey (Byron correctly, if scathingly, rhymed the name with "mouthey") presents a paradox. Arguably the most prolific, inventive, and diversified of the English Romantics, he was early regarded as the leader of the "Lake School" of radical poets (whose other "members" were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Lamb), and then for thirty years held the office of poet laureate of England--the first laureate of stature since Ben Jonson and the first to restore the office from the aura of sinecure and sycophancy that had come to surround it. The prime epic poet of that Romantic Indian summer of the epopee, an indefatigable chronicler of both English and Portuguese history, and--as leading essayist for the Quarterly Review and other publications--a prominent voice in the political and socioeconomic controversies of that turbulent time, Southey was one of the foremost men of letters of his age. Yet his...