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19th Century
During her lifetime, Charlotte Smith was recognized as an influential British Romantic writer for her influential and famous Elegiac Sonnets – these poems sparked a revival for the sonnet form, which was adopted by other Romantics including William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although Beachy Head is now recognized as her magnum opus, it is an unfinished work that was published posthumously in 1807. It is believed that Smith began composing the poem in 1803, and correspondence indicates that Beachy Head underwent continuous revision up until her passing in 1806.

Early reception of Beachy Head was largely positive. In 1807, an unnamed British Critic reviewer described it, and her other posthumously published poetry, as “some of her best work." Later, in 1825, Alexander Dyce published Specimens of British Poetesses: Selected and Chronologically Arranged in which he wrote that Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head had “fresh and vivid” descriptions of rural scenery. Dyce also explained that Smith’s love of botany allowed her to “paint a variety of flowers with a minuteness and a delicacy rarely equaled”.

Smith’s death and gender both played a role in defining early reception of Beachy Head. In the review by the unnamed British Critic, he lamented her death and described her genius as “rarely… surpassed by any individual of her sex." The Critic quotes Beachy Head’s long passage of personal lament. At the same time, a sonnet published in The Times in April of 1807 titled “the Exile --- A Sonnet Attempted in the Style of the Late Mrs. Charlotte Smith,” creates a combination of Smith as the poet of Elegiac Sonnets and as the poor wanderer of Beachy Head. According to Theresa Kelley, “the Times sonnet memorializes Smith as a dead speaker… precisely the kind of elegiac gesture that she had earlier trained her readers to make.

Otherwise, there exists little critical response to Beachy Head from the time of its initial publication. Critical focus tended to be upon her earlier works, particularly her Elegiac Sonnets, The Emigrants, and Emmeline.

20th Century
For much of the early 20th Century, Beachy Head continued to exist in relative obscurity, especially in comparison to her other works. Towards the latter half of the 20th Century, however, that Beachy Head would begin its explosive critical resurgence. Myriad interpretations and critiques quickly started emerging between 1970 and 2000.

Matthew Bray expresses that Beachy Head, “carries Smith’s subversive historiography to its logical conclusion."   In doing so, Smith reveres the central emphasis of patriotic Anglo-Saxon, which is the idea that the Norman Conquest inflicted a tyrannical ‘Yoke’ upon Anglo-Saxon liberties.   He argues that Beachy Head begins not with the earliest English military victories, but instead with, “extensive celebratory history of the Normans, beginning with the Rollos conquest of Normandy and Brittany and ending with William the Conqueror’s defeat of the Anglo- Saxon heptarchy”. In a similarly historical vein, John Rowlett asserts that Smith combined natural history and poetic history most obviously in her final, posthumous works. She had, according to Rowlett, combined emerging knowledge from the study of history with her work in order to discover and utilize novel imagery.

In 1997, Donelle R. Ruwe referred to Beachy Head as a synthesis of “literature, botanical science, and Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden. For Ruwe, however, Beachy Head’s importance came largely from its context in Smith’s larger body of work regarding nature. This way of seeing Beachy Head will go on to be referred to as a ‘dependent fragment poem.’

21st Century
It is in the 21st Century that Beachy Head started to gain popular attention from critics. There has been what some call a  “literary renaissance” for women writers; in the past, scholarly studies as well as mainstream interests in Romantic literature have often overlooked works by female writers. Charlotte Smith, despite her relative fame during her lifetime, was no exception. Literature scholars in the 1980’s studied and printed unpublished manuscripts and collections of poems from female writers, thus making them accessible to a modern group of readers.

Critic John Anderson argues that Beachy Head was the first in line of ‘dependent fragment poems’ He explains that a dependent fragment poem as “The formal determinacy of such poems depends on the readers propensity to relate the fragment to relevant precursors or successors in the authors canon”. Anderson then argues that Keates is the latest of these poets while Smith is the earliest. Similarly, Keates two fragmented epics, “Beachy Head is a fragment that must be fitted into its authors other poetry, that is, “dependant” as a keystone would be”.

Another contemporary critic, Tobias Menely, argues that Beachy Head can be read as an example of late Holocene poetics. This drives from an understanding of energy. Menely explains that energy and more specifically “power” defined by energy-in- time, “that precedes its formal conceptualization in thermodynamic physics, a vernacular language that takes as its exemplary converter not the steam engine but the climate system, that takes as its source of input not the stock of subterranean coal but the flow of solar radiation.” This interpretation suggests that Beachy Head describes systems of power that drive a more ‘natural’ and ‘geo-graphical’ economy as opposed to one driven by man made concepts like “labor markets or machines."

For other modern critics, gender is a key feature of Beachy Head. Theresa M. Kelley argues that the role of gender in Beachy Head is very different from, “...the highly feminized rhetoric of Smith’s earlier poems and so many of her letters.” Kelley further explains that Smith’s poem asks readers to consider gender not so much as the work of an autobiographical,” female poet-speaker who uses an elegiac voice to dun her readers, insisting on their sympathy whether they will or no, but as work concerned with the elegiac as a condition of history (human and geological) that bites into the task of narrating stories of all kinds.” She explains that the elegiac subject of Beachy Head is not centrally the woman poet attacked by others, but that the writing of history is difficult when records are in disagreement with each other. As an outsider to ‘real’ history and ‘real’ literature practiced by men, Smith inevitably experienced gender as “a figure for incompletion, for disrupted and partial narrative.”   Kelley also examines the work of those critics who came before her in “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and ‘Beachy Head." She asserts that Judith Pascoe, Donelle Ruwe, and Donna K. Landry, “all link the poem’s botanical apparatus to women’s writing on botany and pedagogy during the period.” Pascoe and Ruwe also argue that Smith’s  botanical knowledge within the poem as well as the footnotes “amounts to a manifesto of intellectual capability.”

According to Jacqueline M Labbe, Beachy Head is in some ways an attempt to engage with her male contemporary William Wordsworth; in Beachy Head, Smith refers to several of his poems, such as Tintern Abbey, in a convoluted and constrained way although it is likely that Smith was relying on the knowledge her readership of his work to draw parallels. Labbe argues that Smith’s objective is to challenge Wordsworth’s constructed “hierarchy of perception” by offering her own vivid descriptions of a vast spectrum of sensations while also drawing attention to his appropriation of her stylistic use of imagery, particularly in his works from 1798. With this additional layer of Beachy Head, Smith effectively buries Wordsworth within the limestone along with the fossils, botany, geology, politics, war, national  as well as her own personal history as a female poet. Labbe concludes that the speaker in Beachy Head rejects history, society and culture as they move from the headland, through the layers of limestone, only to end at the foot of the clift adopting the life of the Hermit.