SOURCE: “The Thematic Structure of Southey's Epic Poetry,” in Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 6, No. 4, Autumn, 1975, pp. 240-48.

In the following essay, Hoffpauir investigates Southey's epic poetry and points out the three major themes that run through them: the necessity to eliminate evil in the world, the importance of family ties, and the intrinsic benevolence that is found in nature.

A persistent refrain which sounds through criticism of Robert Southey's five epic poems is the lack of narrative unity. In The Spirit of the Age (1825), when Hazlitt compared the structures to “the unweeded growth of a luxuriant and wandering fancy” (p. 177), he was summing up the charge by most reviewers: the epics did not “adhere to ‘strict rules of harmonious composition’”; there was “no dependency of parts” (Monthly Review, 39 [Nov., 1802], 240, 250); they were “composed of scraps … much like the pattern of … patch-work drapery” (Edinburgh Review, 1 [Oct., 1802], 77). Francis Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh...