SOURCE: “Southey in the Tropics: A Tale of Paraguay and the Problem of Romantic Faith,” in Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring, 1974, pp. 97-104.

In the following essay, Bernhardt-Kabisch discusses one of Southey's least-known poems, A Tale of Paraguay, and explains how this unromantic verse narrative expresses the poet's central literary concerns.

Southey's poetry remains as lifeless today as it was when it fell huge but still-born from the press over a century and a half ago. With the possible exception of one or two lyrics and a few scattered passages in the long poems, his verse has neither wit nor depth, neither music nor metaphoric resonance, but is at best picturesque, rhetorically dignified and metrically dextrous, and all too often dull, banal, and downright shoddy. Southey may have been a very good man (as the Victorians kept pointing out) but he was also a bad wizard, whose magic...