‘Where . . . success [is] certain’?: Southey the literary East Indiaman

In 1838, the Poet Laureate Robert Southey published a fifth and final edition of his Indian metrical romance The Curse of Kehama.1 Apart from a few minor verbal changes and the inclusion of a handful of new notes, the main text of the poem differed surprisingly little from the first edition of 1810.2 The major addition was a freshly composed ‘Preface’ that provided readers with copious information about the genesis and compositional history of this ‘Hindoo’ work. Originating in Southey’s childhood plan to exhibit ‘the most remarkable forms of Mythology which have at any time obtained among mankind, by making each the ground-work of a narrative poem’, Kehama had a lengthy and interrupted birth (RSPW, IV, p. 3n).3 Started in 1801, it was not finally completed until 1809. In spite of its fractured history, Kehama was, or so Southey claimed, both ‘more deliberately planned . . . [and] more carefully composed’ than any of his other works, ‘the only one of my long poems of which detached parts were written to be afterwards inserted in their proper places’ (RSPW, IV, p. 5). The ‘Preface’s’ almost confessional use of detail – including its cataloguing of dates and obligations – is significant. Cautioned by the critical response to the ‘Preface’ to the 1796 first edition of Joan of Arc, Southey had for most of his writing life adopted a policy of saying ‘as little as possible by way of preface[s]’ and earlier editions of Kehama had, accordingly, been much less forthcoming.4 The autobiographical and textual information found in the 1838 edition is therefore indicative of the testamentary nature of the enterprise and of the Laureate’s awareness that he was producing the final authorized version of his major poetic attempt at representing India.