ABSTRACT
Southey, Thalaba (1801); review by Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review, I (Oct. 1802), 63-83. This review, the opening salvo of Jeffrey’s unrelenting attack upon the “Lake Poets,” exhibits in its first sentence the perspective of Jeffrey’s criticism: the standards of poetry, like religion, are established and immutable; to question the poetic past is to be apostate. Jeffrey, liberal in politics and economics, was a literary reactionary, objecting to all experimentation and development. On pages 65 ff., Jeffrey attacks directly Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Wordsworth’s poems are alluded to on page 68. But Jeffrey has an easier target for his scorn in Southey’s poem, and he concentrates on its obvious weaknesses.
