Article
French
ID: <
10670/1.nc2q79>
Abstract
This essay intends to reconsider Southey the poet, a chronically underestimated figure of English Romanticism, through a reassessment of his ballads. The appeal of such “minor” poems is based, among other things, on the variety of themes and subjects treated. Humanitarian concerns, the supernatural and the gruesome, comedy and humour are the ingredients of metrical tales noteworthy for their author’s skill at recounting simple stories in which no common powers of language and versification can be traced. The “unconscious of the text” is worth probing into for the light that it throws on the writer’s psyche as well as on the part played by the poet’s imagination in the creative process.