ABSTRACT
This chapter consists of a selection of both RS’s juvenilia and other poems composed by him between c. 1793 and 1810 but not published. The poems have been chosen because they help to shed light on his political views and personal relationships, his practice as a poet and his interaction with his contemporaries. RS began writing verse at a very early age. Although in December 1793 he claimed to have written some thirty-five thousand lines (excluding verse letters), the majority of his earliest works have not survived. Some of these were burnt by Southey himself and others were lost. With the exception of poems contained within his published and unpublished correspondence, the bulk of his surviving juvenile verse can be found in an early notebook, a bound volume of early poems and in the unpublished romances ‘An Improbable Tale’ and ‘Harold’.
