ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the major contributions to the Wat Tyler affair as it developed in the spring of 1817, lingering over the issue of how Robert Southey's past and present "character" is knocked down, built back up, and finally knocked back down again, only differently. It proceeds chronologically, beginning with the early reception of Wat Tyler and the attacks and defenses that followed, and then turning to Southey's Letter and its aftermath. The chapter looks at Lord Byron's rather indulgent attack on Southey in his 1822 poem, The Vision of Judgment, a tour de force that pointedly refuses to have the last laugh. It gives the last word instead to Lord Byron, who extends the comic refiguring of Southey by transforming him into a slightly more human, but even less stereotypically Romantic character in a literary text. The reception of Wat Tyler certainly exemplifies what Lapp calls the "interpenetration of literary and political discourse".
