An antiwar poem with a somewhat different approach - rather than a graphic portrayal of the horrors of the battle, or a heartrending account of loss, it uses a matter of fact tone much more reflective of the common man’s attitude to war, and a couple of children to reveal that the emperor is, indeed, unclad.

Compare this poem to Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, which speaks of “children ardent for some desperate glory” - Southey takes the opposite point of view; that left to themselves, children see war for the pointless exercise it usually is.

Biography

Southey, Robert

b. Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng. d. March 21, 1843, Keswick, Cumberland

English poet and writer of miscellaneous prose who is chiefly remembered for his association with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the early Romantic movement.

[…]

Southey by this time [1799] had decided to earn his living as a writer. In these years he composed many of his best short poems and ballads, and he became a regular contributor to newspapers and reviews. Southey also did translations, edited the works of Thomas Chatterton, and worked on the epic poem Madoc (1805) and completed the epic Thalaba the Destroyer (1801).

In 1803 the Southeys visited the Coleridges, then living at Greta Hall, Keswick. The Southeys remained at Greta Hall for life, partly so that Sara and Edith could be together. Southey’s friendship with Wordsworth, then at nearby Grasmere, dates from this time. The Southeys had seven children of their own, and, after Coleridge left his family for Malta, the whole household was economically dependent on Southey for a time. He was forced to produce unremittingly–poetry, criticism, history, biography, journalism, translations, and editions of earlier writers. During 1809-38 he wrote, for the Tory Quarterly Review, 95 political articles, for each of which he received £100. Of most interest today are those articles urging the state provision of “social services.” He also worked on a projected history of Portugal that he was destined never to finish; only his History of Brazil, 3 vol. (1810-19), was published.

In 1813 Southey was appointed poet laureate through the influence of Sir Walter Scott, and in 1835 his government pension of £160, which had been secured for him by Wynn in 1807, was increased to £300 in recognition of his services to literature. He thus gained economic security, but the unauthorized publication (1817) of Wat Tyler, an early verse drama reflecting his youthful political opinions, enabled his enemies to remind the public of his youthful republicanism. About this time he became involved in a literary imbroglio with Lord Byron, who disliked him. Byron had already attacked Southey in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) and had dedicated to him (1819) the first cantos of Don Juan, a satire on hypocrisy. In his introduction to A Vision of Judgement (1821), Southey continued the quarrel by denouncing Byron as belonging to a “Satanic school” of poetry, and Byron replied by producing a masterful parody of Southey’s own poem under the title The Vision of Judgment (1822). Southey’s last years were clouded by his wife’s insanity, by family quarrels resulting from his second marriage after her death (1837), and by his own failing mental and physical health.

[…]

Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “Lake School” of poetry. His grandiose epic poems, such as Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), were successful in their own time, but his fame is based on his prose work–the vigorous Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War (1823-32), and his classic formulation of the children’s tale “The Three Bears.”

– EB

About the ‘Lake Poets’:

Lake poet

any of the English poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who lived in the English Lake District of Cumberland and Westmorland (now Cumbria) at the beginning of the 19th century. They were first described derogatorily as the “Lake school” by Francis (afterward Lord) Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review in August 1817, and the description “Lakers” was also used in a similar spirit by the poet Lord Byron. These names confusingly group Wordsworth and Coleridge together with Southey, who did not subscribe in his views or work to their theories of poetry.

– EB

Assessment

  Except for a few lyrics, ballads, and comic-grotesque poems--e.g., "My
  days among the Dead are past," "After Blenheim," and "The Inchcape
  Rock" (considered a masterpiece of comic invention)--Southey's poetry
  is little read, but his prose style has been long regarded as masterly
  in its ease and clarity.
  [...]
  His less successful epic poems are  verse romances having a mythological
  or legendary subject matter set in the past and in distant places. In his
  prose works and in his voluminous correspondence, which gives a detailed
  picture of his   literary surroundings and friends, Southey's effortless
  mastery of prose is clearly evident, a fact attested to by such eminent
  contemporaries as William Hazlitt and Scott and even by such an enemy as
  Byron

– EB