ABSTRACT
Robert Southey's 45-book epic Madoc, published in 1805 after 16 years of intermittent labour and several major redrafts, has long been regarded as one of the most spectacular white elephants of English Romanticism. An important instance of David Quint's 'epic of the defeated' which exerted a major influence on Southey's Madoc, was Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana, originally published in Madrid in three parts in 1577, 1578 and 1590. Southey's profound interest in the annals of the Iberian conquest of America might seem eccentric in comparison to the contemporaneous reading of Wordsworth or Coleridge, but less so if seen in a historical context. Southey described the 1799 version of Madoc as being 'as Jacobinical as the heart can wish', compared to the relatively apolitical Arabian romance Thalaba upon which he had begun to work after abandoning Madoc. Even 'Welsh' John Williams was reluctant to accept his namesake's account, given its geographical improbability, preferring a North American setting for Madoc's settlement.
