SOURCE: "Robert Southey's Estimate of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Study in Human Relations," in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 1, November, 1945, pp. 61-94.

In the following essay, Griggs details the association between Southey and Coleridge, commenting on the impact the two poets had on one another's work.

"O Southey," wrote Coleridge just before his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804, "from Oxford to Greta Hall—a spiritual map with our tracks as if two ships had left Port in company." The lives of these two men, indeed, from their first meeting in 1794, were destined to be so inextricably interwoven that any consideration of the one necessarily involves a study of the other; and it would seem advantageous, therefore, to draw together Southey's many comments upon Coleridge. The remarks run the gamut from adulation to downright condemnation, representing as they do judgments based upon "the ups and...