ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Metrical Tales of 1805 that are allowed out only on the understanding that they advertise their contents 'as the desultory productions of a man sedulously employed upon better things', where even the free-standing publications are careful not to make too much of themselves. Sheridan's remarks strikingly resemble Robert Southey's methods: the official response offers to stabilize or hypostatize the text as hybrid genre, 'comical tragedy'; Though Johnson's 'Preface to Shakespeare' indicates the unease attaching to such cross-bred 'mingled drama'. Southey admitted his 'Juvenile and Minor Poems' into the collected edition of his Poetical Works on strict conditions. The segregation of minor from major, is persistent, and cuts across any tendency towards an organic or Wordsworthian continuity of the sort that might otherwise be promised by Southey's reference to the poetry's having arisen out of 'the different stages of life from boyhood to old age'. Southey's minority interest stems from the combined comic and generic uncertainty.
