British Romantic poet (rhymes with "mouthey," as Lord Byron once put it), little-read now but popular in his own time; he was Poet Laureate from 1813 to 1843. Associated with the "Lake School" of poets who wrote of, and lived in, the rural "Lake District" of northern England; more famous members of that group include William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others. Southey came to be much criticized by his younger contemporaries for the abandonment of youthful radicalism and the embrace of Tory conservatism. He is credited, not quite accurately, with creating the popular children's tale "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"; while he did write what became the most canonical version of the tale, he was drawing on extant folktale.
