ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -After his expulsion, Southey’s youthful political sentiments turned markedly radical; he became a rather vocal champion of the French Revolution and began writing an epic poem Joan of Arc (published in 1796) that expressed his enthusiasm for democratic revolution and radical politics.

Detailed explanation-2: -Southey’s epic ambitions began early and eventually resulted in three poems: Joan of Arc (1796), Madoc (1805) and Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814). He was not the first or only poet of the romantic period to produce an epic but he was one of the most publicly controversial and confrontational.

Detailed explanation-3: -Southey has been called the architect and chief practitioner of a “Georgian style” in prose, a style that is pure and practical, in contrast to the ponderous and ornate solemnity of the likes of Samuel Johnson or Edward Gibbon or the rhetorical overkill of Edmund Burke.

Detailed explanation-4: -Robert Southey was born in Wine Street, Bristol, to Robert Southey and Margaret Hill. He was educated at Westminster School, London (where he was expelled for writing an article in The Flagellant, a magazine he originated, attributing the invention of flogging to the Devil), and at Balliol College, Oxford.