User:Hwilson1/sandbox

Composition
Beachy Head is the end of Smith’s writing journey (Keane 59). Smith’s composition began around 1803, although her correspondence suggests that the poem underwent revision until just before her death in 1806 (Keane 59). By the time Smith sent Beachy Head to her publisher, Joseph Johnson, for publication in May 1806, it comprised of over seven hundred lines, a preface, and possibly a memoir and some letters to follow. Beachy Head was published the year after Smith’s death, in February 1807. In the final published edition, Beachy Head had no preface, memoirs, or letters” (Kelley 296).

Smith was born near Beachy Head and lived there for the majority of her life (Kelley 291). Smith spent her last years living in cheap housing near Beachy Head, and in poverty due to debt caused by her estranged husband, Benjamin Smith (Goodman 1002). She spent this time writing Beachy Head and other works. Eventually, Smith had sunk into ill health and she died in Tilford, near Farnham, on the 28th of October, 1806 (Chambers). Francis William Blagdon speaks on the impact Smith’s illnesses on her writing abilities; Smith’s degrading health “totally exhaust[ed] her frame; but the powers of her extraordinary mind lost neither their strength nor their brilliancy” (Blagdon).

Smith was a poet of her times, so much so that she has been called a “French Revolution Poet” (Goodman 983). This title is complicated by the fact that by 1805, when Smith was writing Beachy Head, tensions between the British and French were at their highest pitch (Goodman 988). In Beachy Head, the shore in question is almost always a particular coast: the seaside cliffs of Sussex, at or near the giant rock formation called Beachy Head, which faces south across the Channel and is the English mainland closest to France (Goodman 983-984). During the French Revolution and Napoleonic War, as Smith wrote most of her work, the watchful apprehension of “what lay beyond the Channel coast was inseparable from the political questions and economic interests arising at the British border” (Goodman 983-984). The context of the war influences Smith, as the British soldiers were preparing for the French to invade, they were stationed at Beachy Head. Smith even notions to war tensions in the poem: “hostile war fires flashing to the sky” (Smith 228).

The chalk headland, Beachy Head, is the revolution of the migrant earth itself. The geographical displacements of the 1790s represent geological change and tells the much older story of the revolution-shaped earth. The physical transformation of the earth keeps alive the geological anticipation, and the relevance of what was then, the present political tensions and revolutions, which shows through in Smith’s works, including Beachy Head (Goodman 990).

Beachy Head is arguably the least autobiographical of any of her work. (Keane 59). Smith had synthesized with current political and geological tensions only to withdraw from them in this poem: “she finds it impossible to contain national history within her verse” (Keane 62). Instead, she “recasts the language of colonial exploration as hollow commercial exploitation,” and dismisses developments in “geological enquiries as ‘conjecture’, a branch of ‘vain’” and unproven science (Keane 62). In terms of influence, Smith grafts together two historical models to craft her poem: the first a “classical, linear model, focusing on ‘politics and statecraft,’” highlighting the outward societal contexts (Keane 59). The second focuses on the “‘personal experience, eyewitness accounts, and even spectator sympathy [that] disrupted the protocols of classical historiography,” because of the focus on the personal and individual (Keane 59).