ABSTRACT
Towards the end of 1815, Robert Southey wrote to his old friend Charles Wynn, apologizing for not calling on him on the way back from the Continent, where, with his wife, daughter Edith May, and a few friends, he had been visiting the battlefield at Waterloo. Southey himself was very conscious of the oddity of the work published in 1816 as The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo; of the introductory stanzas he wrote, 'The Proem touching upon my return home and personal feelings will be obnoxious to the charge of egotism'. Southey's Laureate poems of 1816 take their place in a debate about the relation between poetry and the wider world. Byron and Southey are the poets doing what they can to confront the public and private agonies of that post-war period, in which all values seem to be inverted.
