Southey was born 12 August 1774 in Bristol and raised through his early years mostly in Bath. He attended Westminster School in London, but after criticizing the school for excessive corporal punishment was expelled. That youthful crisis notwithstanding, he matriculated at Oxford in 1792, living in Balliol College. Here he established the dual interests that would drive his subsequent literary career: precocious ambition and wide-ranging, often arcane, erudition. In 1794, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who shared both his literary aspirations and his radical political views, and together that same year the two wrote a verse drama, . In 1795, however, Southey secretly married Edith Fricker, and common domestic considerations began to dissipate his utopian passions. …
