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Influence of Beachy Head on Other Texts
Although Charlotte Smith’s influence has been “profound and long-lasting ”, her work has been underrepresented in the study of Romantic literature. In the essay “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head,” Theresa M. Kelley notes that Smith’s work remained largely unexplored in the twentieth century until the 1980s when “scholars began to circulate unpublished transcripts of her poems”.

Academic Stephen C. Behrendt notes that while Smith’s influence was “wide, formative, and powerful,” few of her contemporaries left detailed accounts of her influence on their work. Despite this, her influence was understood by her contemporaries. An 1807 review of Beachy Head: With Other Poems in the Annual Review and History of Literature notes that “as a descriptive writer, either in verse or prose, she [Smith] was surpassed by few ” while an 1808 review of Beachy Head in British Critic acknowledges Smith as a “genuine child of genius” and notes that her “poetic feeling and ability have rarely been surpassed by any individual of her sex”.

Although some contemporary critics claim Smith’s work has a tendency to “read stiltedly” for modern audiences, Jacqueline M. Labbe contends that Smith’s work, including Beachy Head, calls to the “Romantic notion of individuality” but that it does so in a way that is “inflected by a desire to challenge social constructions of individuality”. Stuart Curran, editor of The Poems of Charlotte Smith, argues that Beachy Head is a work that “strikes distinctly modern chords” from both a psychological and ecological standpoint. Indeed, Beachy Head positions Smith as one of the “first social ecologist poets." In the poem, Smith crafts a style of work in which “human interests figure as intertwined with the interests of the natural world and must be accounted for”, predicting the attitudes of contemporary ecocriticism and social ecology . Kelli M. Holt goes so far as to say that Beachy Head “anticipates the altruism called for by contemporary ecocriticism ” while Stuart Curran claims that “in no [other] poem of the period can one find so powerful an impulse to resolve the self into nature." Curran further contends that Beachy Head presents “an alternate Romanticism that seeks not to transcend or to absorb nature but to contemplate and honor its irreducible alterity. ”