SOURCE: “History and Transcendence in Robert Southey's Epic Poems,” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 19, No. 4, Autumn, 1979, pp. 589-608.

In the following essay, Meachen analyzes Southey's epic poems in terms of how they reflect the poet's and contemporary society's moral, political, and social ideas. The critic also explains how Southey attempted to show through his verses that societal reform could be achieved by adhering to common moral ideas and through the irresistible progression of history.

“In verse only we throw off the yoke of the world,” Robert Southey wrote years after abandoning poetry as a vocation, “and are as it were privileged to utter our deepest and holiest feelings. … We express in it, and receive in it sentiments for which, were it not for this permitted medium, the usages of the world would neither allow utterance nor acceptance.”¹ He always believed that poetry was the sublimest form...