Robert Southey

(1774 - 1843)

Robert Southey befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1794. The two men cowrote The Fall of Robespierre and briefly agreed to create a utopian community in the United States. In 1795 Southey and Coleridge married the sisters Sara and Edith Fricker, respectively. After he became poet laureate in 1813, Southey engaged in a feud with Lord Byron, leading the former to denounce the latter as a member of the “Satanic school” of poetry. He published Letters from England under the pseudonym Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella.