Many of the posts on Clay Lane are by well known writers such as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Others are by less well known authors who have something no less important to say.
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Robert Southey (1774-1843) was Poet Laureate from 1813 to his death, a scholar of Spanish and Portuguese history, and also a biographer and essayist. He was a close friend of poets Samuel Coleridge Taylor and Robert Lovell, experimented with laughing gas for Sir Humphrey Davy, and published a diary of his travels in Scotland with engineer Thomas Telford; however, although he championed the working man Southey’s politics were conservative, tending towards socialist-style Utopian state control, which alienated many of his more libertarian friends and colleagues. Southey asked that his name be pronounced with the ‘south’ as it is in ‘south’ rather than ‘southern;’ Byron, who objected to his views, rhymed his surname with ‘mouthy.’