Collected Poems

Southwell Saint Robert

One of our earliest English critics, Ben Jonson, famously wished that he had written Southwell's "Burning Babe", the most famous poem of the body of spiritual verse written by the Elizabethan priest, poet and martyr S. Robert Southwell SJ (1561-1595). This book is a complete, authentic edition of Southwell's poems, in English and Latin, offering new texts based on the very manuscripts which were circulated in secret among English Catholics in the years following the poet's death. By re-examining these contemporary manuscripts, this edition allows Southwell's poems to regain some of their original purpose of communicating forbidden theologies and doctrines amongst a criminalised and near-silenced readership of secret groups. These are the poems of those Catholics who did not or could not flee the country as the Elizabethan State bore down upon their faith in the last two decades of the sixteenth century.

Audacious and beautiful in themselves, Southwell's poems were also immensely influential in the the development of early modern English literature; his new visions and visualisations bear their fruit a generation later in the works of Donne and Herbert. Southwell's rare Latin verses, available here for the first time, accompanied by a new translation, demonstrate the significant creative debt owed to him by the Augustans, even by Milton.

About the Author

Saint Robert Southwell was born in 1561 at Horsham St Faith's in Norfolk, the son of a gentleman who had conformed to the protestant church. He was reconciled to Catholicism and entered the Society of Jesus at Rome when he was seventeen. He studied in Douai, Louvain and Rome. He returned to England to work as a mission Priest (of neccessity in secret and always in fear of the English law which held that all Catholic Priests were traitors) in London from 1584 to 1592. He was betrayed, captured and imprisoned. After three years in jail, during which he was frequently tortured, he was martyred at Tyburn in 1595. He was beatified in 1927, and canonised in 1970.

The texts of his poems circulated in secret at first in manuscript copies. Shortly after his martyrdom, printed editions, expurgated of explicitly Catholic material, began to appear and were much in demand and were widely influential. A few of Southwell's works have a secure place in the canon of English poetry, but the advocacy of such distinguished poets as Geoffrey Hill, and increasing scholarly interest in the minority traditions of Renaissance Britain, are beginning to claim for him a place as one of the most important English poets of the sixteenth century.

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