In 1801 the leading radical poet Robert Southey gave his non-literary friend Charles Biddlecombe his private opinion of two recent publications:

The works that he was so very pointedly failing to recommend both had the same title – Alfred, an Epic Poem. The first, in which Southey was probably more involved than he cared to admit, was by his loyal friend and early publisher Joseph Cottle, and appeared in 1800. The second, published less than a year later in 1801, was by Henry James Pye, the ex-politician who had held the post of Poet Laureate since 1790. As their identical titles suggest, both poems were epics (though Cottle's work was about twice as long as Pye's), both had as their central, heroic figure Alfred the Great, and both concentrated on exactly the same period in the Anglo-Saxon king's career (his retreat to the isle of Athelney and his eventual defeat and conversion of the Danish invaders). Moreover, there is another, less commendable, similarity between the two texts. From a late twentieth-century perspective, Southey's negative judgement of both seems to have been right. Neither Alfred is part of the canon, and Cottle and Pye have, respectively, suffered from either ridicule or total neglect.