User:LEvalyn/Draft:Elegiac Sonnets

Elegiac Sonnets, titled Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Charlotte Sussman of Bignor Park, in Sussex in its first edition, is a collection of poetry written by Charlotte Turner Smith, first published in 1784. It was widely popular and frequently reprinted, with Smith adding more poems over time. Elegiac Sonnets is credited with re-popularizing the sonnet form in the eighteenth century. It is notable for its poetic representations of personal emotion, which made it an important early text in the Romantic literary movement.

Contents
The first edition of Elegiac Sonnets in 1784 was a single volume with sixteen sonnets and three other poems. The ninth edition, in 1800, was the last which Smith supervised. The last edition to add new poems, the tenth edition in 1812, was two volumes, with fifty-nine sonnets and eight other poems.

Poems in the first 1784 edition

 * Sonnet I ["The partial muse"]
 * Sonnet II, "Written at the Close of Spring"
 * Sonnet III, "To a Nightingale"
 * Sonnet IV, "To the Moon"
 * Sonnet V, "To the South Downs"
 * Sonnet VI, "To Hope"
 * Sonnet VII, "On the Departure of the Nightingale"
 * Sonnet VIII, "To Sleep"
 * Chanson, par le Cardinal Bernis
 * Imitation
 * The Origin of Flattery
 * Sonnet, Supposed to be Written by Werther ["Go, cruel tyrant"]
 * Sonnet, Supposed to be Written by Werther, "To Solitude"
 * Sonnet, Supposed to be Written by Werther ["Make there my tomb"]
 * Sonnet, from Petrarch ["Loose to the wind"]
 * Sonnet, from Petrarch ["Where the green leaves"]
 * Sonnet, from Petrarch ["Ye vales and woods"]
 * "To Spring"
 * Untitled sonnet ["Blest is yon shepherd"]

Selected poems added in later editions

 * Sonnet XXVII ["Sighing I see yon little troop"]
 * Sonnet XXXII, "To Melancholy. Written on the banks of the Arun October, 1785"
 * Sonnet XXXIX, from the novel of Emmeline, "To Night"
 * Sonnet XL, from the novel of Emmeline, ["Far on the sands"]
 * Sonnet XLI, "To Tranquillity"
 * Sonnet XLIV, "Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex"
 * Sonnet LIX, "Written during a Thunder Storm, September, 1791; in which the Moon was perfectly clear, while the Tempest gathered in various directions near the Earth."
 * Sonnet LVIII, "The Glow-Worm"
 * Sonnet LXX, "On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because it was Frequented by a Lunatic"
 * Sonnet LXXIV, "The Winter Night"
 * Sonnet LXXX, "To the Invisible Moon"
 * Sonnet LXXXIII, "The Sea View"
 * Sonnet LXXXIV, "To the Muse"
 * Sonnet XCII, "Written at Bignor Park in Sussex, in August, 1799"

Style
Smith avoided the Italian Petrarchan sonnet form for her sonnets; of the ninety-two sonnets in the tenth edition of Elegiac Sonnets, only two are Petrarchan. Instead, she experimented with sonnet forms that were better suited to the English language. Many sonnets are technically Shakespearean sonnets, but most are irregular in some way. Scholars have described her experiments with the sonnet form as pursuing a simpler, more natural, and more direct poetic language which matched the emotions she expressed better than the artificial language common to Italian sonnets. This pursuit of simple, direct expression is among the reasons Smith is classed as a Romantic poet, and anticipates the poetic innovations of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. The Romantic poet John Keats was indebted to Smith's innovations for his own attempts to devise a new, specifically English sonnet form.

There was some backlash against this simplicity. Because Italian sonnets require many more rhymes on the same word ending, the Shakespearean sonnet form was considered to be easier than Petrarchan or Miltonic sonnets, and therefore less legitimate. William Beckford parodied the perceived easiness of Smith's sonnets with a poem called "Elegiac Sonnet to a Mopstick." Anna Seward, a major female sonneteer to follow Smith, criticized Smith for deviating from the prescribed forms. Similarly, when Mary Robinson published her own sonnet sequence in 1796, she emphasized her own adherence to formal rules in the title Sappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets.

Influences
Smith's sonnets were influenced by Thomas Gray's poetry, including his only sonnet, "On the Death of Mr. Richard West," which was written in 1742 and published in 1775. Smith frequently praised Gray as a poet and referenced his works, which share her melancholy tone. Smith was also aware of John Milton's seventeenth-century sonnets, such as his "O Nightingale," which defined what eighteenth-century poets expected from English sonnets. After the first edition of Elegiac Sonnets, Smith would also be influenced as a poet by William Cowper's The Task.

Melancholy sensibility
An overall feeling of bleak sadness is the dominating feature of Elegiac Sonnets, setting Smith's works apart from previous sonnets, which were typically love poems. Sentimental novels at the time popularly featured male figures of lonely, melancholy suffering, such as Harley in The Man of Feeling (1771) and Werther in The Sorrows of Young Werther (published in English in 1779). Elegiac Sonnets created a female, poetic version of this figure in many autobiographical sonnets. Other sonnets describe themselves as having been written by Werther and convey emotional moments of the book.

Autobiographical elements
"It remains almost impossible to separate Smith's writings from the facts of her life. Her sonnets in particular demand this kind of reading, especially when viewed alongside the writer's various prefaces to the work." The preface to the first edition emphasizes her own experience of sadness as the impetus for her writing when she says "Some very melancholy moments have been beguiled by expressing in verse the sensations those moments brought." Many of the poems in the first edition of Elegiac Sonnets were composed while Smith was in debtors' prison with her husband. "the 'woman in distress' was a popular trope in the sentimental literature of the period, and what Smith seemed to be presenting to her readers was a real-life version of this figure." "Sonnet V, 'To the South Downs,' has come to be regarded as emblematically 'Smithian' in the way it uses her own life, sketched only in vague terms, to heighten the emotional register of the poem." -- make wiki page for Sonnet V

Literary allusions
"Smith's poetry involves literary associations, too, full of echoes of, quotations of, and allusions to a host of English poets, as well as Petrarch and Goethe."

Dual genres
An important part of Smith's impact was her introduction of new subject matter in her sonnets, the "elegiac" aspect of Elegiac Sonnets. Twenty years later, Wordsworth and Coleridge would advocate for a view of poetry by juxtaposing two opposed poetic forms, lyric and ballad, in their volume Lyrical Ballads. Smith's merging of elegy and the sonnet, typically associated with love poetry, accomplishes a similar paradigm shift. Addresses French Revolution - "In these later sonnets, Smith demonstrates that the sonnet form... is capacious and flexible enough to engage with a wide range of political and historical matters, and that its very reliance on a first-person lyric speaker makes it an ideal feature for evoking the relationships between individual experience and the historical present." "As her title suggests, Smith's series of sonnets combine the formal demands of the sonnet with the elegiac mode of intense grief and moral lament." "These remarkable sonnets, famous for their melancholy, pessimism, and pathos, represent an important stylistic achievement in their ability to convey a highly personal effect through an understated and impersonal style."

Nature
Smith's interest in nature was "not transcendent 'visionary nature' or material transformed by the sublime self, but a realm of phenomena to be studied and classified."
 * Find that article on the river Arun

Sonnet revival
The sonnet as a poetic form was first popular in English language during the Renaissance, but it had fallen out of use by the eighteenth century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his literary criticism, famously credited Smith and her contemporary William Lisle Bowles (whose Fourteen Sonnets came out in 1789) with creating a revival of the English sonnet. Bowles achieved similar success to Smith, though contemporary reviews identified his form, tone, and subjects as derivatives of Smith's. The sonnet ultimately became one of the leading poetic forms of Romantic poetry,  used by every major Romantic poet except William Blake.

Importantly, the eighteenth century revival of the sonnet now included female sonneteers. Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson described the revival as "the first period of literary history in which women poets showed they could match skill with male poets in an arena earlier closed to them, for previously women had existed in the sonnet only as love objects to be wooed or idealized." The sonnet form, as a classic and almost old-fashioned kind of writing, carried a cultural legitimacy which was lacking in newer genres like the novel. Smith was the first eighteenth-century woman to publish a volume of sonnets, followed in 1799 by Anna Seward's Original Sonnets on Various Subjects.

The journalist John Thelwall called Smith "the undisputed English master of the genre."


 * STC "Introduction to the Sonnets," Poems

William Wordsworth
Smith "became one of the shaping forces of English Romanticism through her writing." "Wordsworth and Coleridge learned from her, admiring her more in their youth than they were later willing to admit. Both used Smith's work as a model for working out their new style of Romantic self-expression."

"Charlotte Smith was already famous for her Elegiac Sonnets when Cambridge student William Wordsworth sought her out in Brighton on his way to France in 1791." Wordsworth "would read her sonnets in 1802 to encourage his own exercise in the form," documented in Dorothy Wordsworth's journal. Wordsworth's 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads critiques a much older sonnet by Thomas Gray as an example of poetic trends which need to be changed. . He critiques its "poetic artifice", identifying only a few lines of the poem which he thinks are successful at expressing true emotion, and describes the necessity for the kinds of changes that Smith herself had already done. "Wordsworth neglects to mention his debt to his more immediate predecessors such as Smith, opting instead to attack a writer... who anticipates Wordsworth's aesthetic in a few lines of natural diction but nonetheless fails to achieve it overall." "For the hundreds of sonnets he wrote, Wordsworth never publicly acknowledged any debt to Charlotte Smith, William Lisle Bowles, and other sonnet writers of the eighteenth century. Instead, he claimed Milton as his precursor". "Wordsworth knew Smith and her poetry. As early as 1789... Wordsworth obtained a copy of the fifth edition of Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, in which he made some nots, added hi name to a list of late subscribers, and copied by hand early versions of two sonnets that would not appear until the sixth edition." He also recommended to his friend Alexander Dyce that he include more of Smith's sonnets in Dyce's Speciments of British Poetesses.


 * Blackscheider, Eighteenth Century Women Poets and Their Poetry
 * Staves, A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain
 * Behrendt, British Women Poets
 * Wolfson, Romantic Interactions

Reception
Smith's sonnets were well-regarded during her lifetime. "Charlotte Smith's poetry was not only critically celebrated but also incredibly popular with the reading public. It is a testament to the power of the sympathy generated by the writer's poetry... that it touched its readers on a deeply visceral level. People were moved by Smith's work: moved to sympathize with her plight as evoked in her sonnets and their prefaces; moved to create poetry themselves as a response to her poetry; moved to support the author through a subscription to her volumes." "the publication of seemingly endless sequences of poems by other poets both celebrating Smith's work and lamenting the sad circumstances that produced it." Elegiac Sonnets "became one of the most well-respected and popular books of the century." "John Thelwall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sit Walter Scott, and Leigh Hunt were among the contemporary writers who celebrated Smith's poetic achievements."

However, "Smith's reputation did not fare so well in the period immediately following her death, and by the second decade of the nineteenth century she had been relegated to the position of 'woman writer' and therefore 'minor.'" "Smith seems to have been well and truly forgotten as a female poet by the time that Elizabet Barrett Browning [who also worked in the sonnet] made her famous lament" that "England has had many learned women, not merely readers, but writers... and yet where were the poetesses? ... I look everywhere for Grandmothers & see none."(Letters of EBB)

"This cultural 'forgetting' of the women who dominated the poetic marketplace during Smith's heyday persisted well into the twentieth century." However, with the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s, scholars rediscovered Smith's works, especially Elegiac Sonnets. "Critics such as Stuart Curran, Jacqueline Labbe, and Sarah Zimmerman played a central role both in revising conventional accounts of Romanticism, with women assuming their rightful position as central poetic voices of the 1790s, and in locating Smith at the forefront of developments in lyrical poetry in the period. With Smith's position at the heart of a revised, much larger canon of Romantic writers now secure, the scene was set for an explosion of interest in her broader oeuvre."
 * Duckling's article in Labbe on her reception