Thalaba the Destroyer is an 1801 epic poem composed by Robert Southey. The origins of the poem can be traced to Southey's school boy days, but he did not begin to write the poem until he finished composing Madoc at the age of 25. Thalaba the Destroyer was completed while Southey travelled in Portugal. When the poem was finally published by the publisher Longman, it suffered from poor sales and only half of the copies were sold by 1804. The poem is divided into twelve "books" with irregular stanza structures and unrhymed lines of poetry. The story describes how a group of sorcerers work to destroy the Hodeirah family in an attempt to prevent a prophecy of their future doom from coming true. However, a young child named Thalaba is able to escape from the slaughter. After one of the sorcerers hunts down Thalaba to kill him, the sorcerer is defeated by a great storm and his powerful magical ring comes into Thalaba's possession. With the ring, Thalaba travels across the Middle East to find a way to defeat the evil sorcerers. In the end, Thalaba is able to stay true to Allah and is guided by the prophet Mohammad in destroying the sorcerers. Southey uses the poem to describe various superstitions and myths, with a heavy reliance on repetition of various themes that link the myths together. Although based in Islamic theology, most of the action is mechanical instead of emphasising possible moral truths that can be drawn from the plot. Though the main character is purported to be a Muslim, the story actually takes place thousands of years before Islam, in ancient Babylon. Critics gave the work mixed reviews, with some emphasising the strong morality within the work or the quality of the poetry. However, other critics felt that the lack of a strong lyrical structure and the use of Middle Eastern myths detracted from the poem.

Examines a range of Robert Southey's writing to explore the relationship between Romantic literature and colonial politics during the expansion of Britain's second empire. This study draws upon a range of interdisciplinary materials to consider the impact of his work upon nineteenth-century views of empire.

Robert Southey was born on the 12th of August 1774 in Bristol. A poet of the Romantic school and one of the "Lake Poets." Although his fame has been eclipsed by that of his friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey's verse was highly influential and he wrote movingly against the horrors and injustice of the slave trade. Among his other classics are Inchcape Rock as well as a number of plays including Wat Tyler. He was great friends with Coleridge, indeed in 1795, in a plan they soon abandoned, they thought to found a utopian commune-like society, called Pantisocracy, in the wilds of Pennsylvania. However, that same year, the two friends married sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker. Southey's marriage was successful but Coleridge's was not. In 1810 he abandoned his wife and three children to Southey's care in the Lake District. Although his income was small and those dependent upon him growing in number he continued to write and burnish his reputation with a wider public. In 1813 on the refusal of Walter Scott he was offered by George II the post of Poet Laureate, a post Southey accepted and kept till his death 30 years later. Southey was also a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, essay writer, historian and biographer. His biographies included those of John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson. He was a renowned scholar of Portuguese and Spanish literature and history, and translated works from those two languages into English and wrote a History of Brazil (part of his planned but un-completed History of Portugal) and a History of the Peninsular War. Perhaps his most enduring contribution is the children's classic The Story of the Three Bears, the original Goldilocks story, first published in Southey's prose collection The Doctor. In 1838, Edith died and Southey married Caroline Anne Bowles, also a poet, on 4 June 1839. Robert Southey died on the 21st of March, 1843 and is buried in Crosthwaite Church in Keswick.

In his Preface to The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature, James Twitchell writes that he is not interested in the current generation of vampires, which he finds "rude, boring and hopelessly adolescent. However, they have not always been this way. In fact, a century ago they were often quite sophisticated, used by artists varied as Blake, Poe, Coleridge, the Brontes, Shelley, and Keats, to explain aspects of interpersonal relations. However vulgar the vampire has since become, it is important to remember that along with the Frankenstein monster, the vampire is one of the major mythic figures bequeathed to us by the English Romantics. Simply in terms of cultural influence and currency, the vampire is far more important than any other nineteenth-century archetypes; in fact, he is probably the most enduring and prolific mythic figure we have. This book traces the vampire out of folklore into serious art until he stabilizes early in this century into the character we all too easily recognize.