Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and figurations of Iberia. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 1999. ISBN: 90-420-0409-6. Price: £40.

In May 1815 Charles Lamb wrote to the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, thanking him for a copy of his latest publication: Although Lamb joked about its "comfortable" qualities, Roderick is perhaps the most uncomfortable—and certainly until recently the most neglected—of Southey's five long poems. Set in seventh century Spain, it draws on the history of (and legends surrounding) Roderick (Rodrigo), the last visigothic king of Spain, whose rape of the noblewoman Florinda precipitates a Moorish invasion and takeover of his country. Southey's narrative focuses on the events after the Moors assumption of power, on Roderick's repentance for his crimes and the organisation of Christian resistance to Moorish rule. This opposition centres on Pelayo, Roderick's successor as Christian leader, and will eventually culminate in the reconquest of 1492. Southey (author of the oriental romances Thalaba the Destroyer [1801] and The Curse of Kehama [1810]) was far from being a man of "timid imagination", but to his contemporaries his choice of subject matter from nearer home would not have come as a surprise. He was in fact one of the leading hispanists of the Romantic period: he had travelled in Spain as early as 1795-6 and his account of his experiences, first published in 1797, had gone through three editions by 1808; he was fluent in the language and from the mid 1790s onwards had been an ardent populariser of Spanish literature, translating amonst others works by Yriate, De Vega for the Morning Post and also publishing English versions of the romances Amadis of Gaul (1803) and The Chronicle of the Cid (1808). Roderick therefore allowed him to indulge a long term interest in Spanish history and culture and also to demonstrate (especially in its lengthy endnotes) his hispanic learning to a Romantic reading public. Yet Southey—and indeed Lamb—were not the only ones to feel "at home in Spain". Roderick proved to be popular with readers and was into a third edition by 1815. It was equally not unique in its choice of subject matter or geographical location. By the time Southey's poem appeared in 1814, the Roderick legend had been so well absorbed into British culture that Matthew Lewis described it as "too well known to require any recital". It formed the basis of Walter Scott's The Vision of Don Roderick (1811) and Walter Savage Landor's Count Julian (1812). They were not alone. In 1809 Wordsworth had begun an unpublished fragment entitled "Pelayo" and Byron had referred to Roderick and Count Julian (Florinda's father) in the first canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). (Coincidentally, or perhaps not, "Pelayo" had been Southey's original choice of subject and title for his own "Spanish" long poem.) Moreover, the efforts of Southey, Scott, Landor and Byron represent just a handful of the many Romantic "irruptions of Helicon" which dealt with the matter of Spain. The extent, nature and complexity of British Romantic writers' engagement with Spain forms the subject of Diego Saglia's Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and figurations of Iberia. Although Spanish culture and society had figured in pre-Romantic British culture, through a series of historical accidents, it achieved both increasing topicality and resonance in the early nineteenth century. From the Peninsula conflict of the 1800s through to the Carlist wars of the 1830s, events in the Iberian peninsular were the subject of parliamentary debate, practical intervention (witnessed in British military involvement in the peninsular) and literary endeavour. Whilst he briefly surveys important literary ancestors for and descendants of Romantic hispanism, Saglia wisely concentrates his analysis on representations of Spain in British literature (especially poetry) of the 1810s and 1820s. His detailed …