ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the context and idiom for a handful of poems contributed by Robert Southey to The Morning Post in 1798 and 1799. It explores the two key components with the Fasti in mind therefore, Southey intended to 'take the natural history of the year', and examine a global mixture of historical anniversaries, religious feasts and folk customs. Firstly, it demonstrates a conscious recognition on Southey's part of the powerful potentiality of the calendar as a vein for poetic experimentation; a fact which is important for the author's argument here, as well as for the wider argument that Southey is too rarely accredited with the kind of poetic innovation for which his fellow Romantics are celebrated. Secondly, if Southey had carried through his plan, the resultant collection of poems would have been his most sustained and wide-ranging political statement of the 1790's.
