1455. Robert Southey to Walter Savage Landor, 2 May 1808 ⁠* 

I have sent you all that is written of the Curse of Kehama. [1]  You offered to print it for me, – if ever I finish the poem it will be because of that offer, tho without the slightest intention of accepting it. – Enough is written to open the story of the poem, & serve as a specimen of its manner tho much of what is to follow would be of <in> a wilder strain. Tell me if your ear is offended with the rhymes when they occur, or if it misses them when they fail. – I wish it had never been begun, because I like it too well to throw it behind the fire, & not well enough to compleat it without the ‘go-on’ of some one whose approbation is worth having.

My history as an author is not very honourable to the age in which we live. By giving up my whole time to worthless work in reviews magazines & newspapers I could thrive; – by giving up half my time to them I contrive to live. In the time thus employed every year I could certainly produce such a poem as Thalaba, [2]  & if I did I should starve. You have wakened in me prospects that had been laid asleep, & recalled hopes which I had dismissed, contentedly as I thought, for ever. If you think Kehama deserves to be published I will borrow hours from sleep & finish it, by rising two hours before my customary time. When it is finished I will try whether subscribers can be procured for five hundred copies, by which means I should secure the whole profits to myself. The booksellers share is too much like the Lions in the fable. – 30 or 33 per cent they first deduct as booksellers, & then halve the residue as publishers. I have no reason to complain of mine. They treat me with great respect & great liberality, – but I wish to be independent of them, & this, if it could be effected, would make me so.

The will & the power to produce any thing great are not often found together. I wish you would write in English, because it is a better language than Latin, – & because the disuse of English as a living, & literary language would be the greatest evil that could befall mankind. It would cost you little labour to write perspicuously, & thus get rid of your only fault. If you will not write English, – write Latin, & in God’s name get overcome that superstition about Robert Smith. [3]  When I consider what he is, it puts me out of all patience to think – that the ghost of what he might have has been should overlay you like a night mare.

Literary fame is the only fame of which a wise man ought to be ambitious, because it is the only lasting & living fame. Bonaparte will be forgotten before his term in purgatory is half over, – or but just remembered as <like> Nimrod [4]  & other cut throats of antiquity; who serve us for the common-places of declamation. If you made yourself King of Crete, [5]  you would differ from a hundred other adventurers only in chronology, & in the course of a millennium or two nothing more would be known of your conquest than what would be found in the stereotype Gebir, [6]  prefixed as an account of the author. Pour out your mind in a great poem, & you will exercise authority over the feelings & opinions of mankind as long as the language lasts in which you write. xxx

Your 2 £ has been paid to the subscription for the Grasmere orphans [7]  enough has been raised to provide for their well-being, & well-doing.

Farewell. I wish you had purchased Lowes-water instead of Llantony [8]  – I wish you were married, because the proverb about a rolling stone applies to a single heart, – & I wish you were as much a Quaker as I am. Christian Stoicism is wholesome for all amends. Were I your Confessor I should enjoin you to throw wide Rousseau & make Epictetus [9]  your manual. Probatum est. [10] 

Yrs truly

Robert Southey.

Keswick. Cumberland.

May 2. 1808.