SOURCE: Pollard Brown, Nancy. “General Introduction.” In The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., edited by James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown, pp. xv-xxxiv. Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1967.

In the essay which follows, Brown situates and examines Southwell's works in the context of his life and spiritual activities.

The death of Robert Southwell at Tyburn on 21 February (O.S.) 1595 was at once the end of his work as Mission priest and the beginning of a wider public interest in his literary achievement. His life in the Society of Jesus had been dedicated to the Roman Catholic cause in England; the prose and poetry he wrote in English had been undertaken in order to further his work as priest. During the last years of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth his reputation was based on his work as a lyric poet whose...