Elegiac Sonnets

Elegiac Sonnets

The title page from the second edition
Author	Charlotte Smith
Publication date	1784

Elegiac Sonnets, titled Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Charlotte Sussman of Bignor Park, in Sussex in its first edition,^[1] is a collection of poetry written by Charlotte Smith, first published in 1784. It was widely popular and frequently reprinted, with Smith adding more poems over time.^[1][2][3] Elegiac Sonnets is credited with re-popularizing the sonnet form in the eighteenth century.^[1][2][4][5] It is notable for its poetic representations of personal emotion, which made it an important early text in the Romantic literary movement.^[2][3]

The first edition of Elegiac Sonnets in 1784 was a single volume with sixteen sonnets and three other poems.^[2]: 28 Six of these sonnets had previously appeared in the periodicals The European Magazine and The New Annual Register.^[6]: 25 The ninth edition, in 1800, was the last which Smith supervised.^[1] The last edition to add new poems, the tenth edition in 1812, was two volumes, with fifty-nine sonnets and eight other poems.^[2]: 28

• 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"^{[note 1]} *
• 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"^{[note 2]}
• Untitled sonnet ["Blest is yon shepherd"]^{[note 3]}

Poems marked with "*" appeared in periodical publications prior to being collected in the first volume.

• 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"

Smith avoided the Italian

There was some backlash against this simplicity.[4]^: 12 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.^[4]: 12 William Beckford parodied the perceived easiness of Smith's sonnets with a poem called "Elegiac Sonnet to a Mopstick."^[4]: 13 Anna Seward, a major female sonneteer to follow Smith, criticized Smith for deviating from the prescribed forms.^[4]: 13 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.^[4]: 13

Smith's sonnets were influenced by

An overall feeling of bleak sadness is the dominating feature of Elegiac Sonnets,[2]^[3] setting Smith's works apart from previous sonnets, which were typically love poems.^[7] 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).^[2]: 17 Elegiac Sonnets created a female, poetic version of this figure in many autobiographical sonnets.^[2]: 17 Other sonnets describe themselves as having been written by Werther and convey emotional moments of the book.

Smith's depiction of the natural world is notable for introducing a key Romantic theme in ways that don't match later Romantic depictions.^[1][5] The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge particularly praised the sonnets that make connections between nature and human feelings, a poetic technique which would come to be a defining trait of Romantic poetry.^[5] However, in most of her poetry, Smith's depiction of nature differed from the later Romantics in that she was interested in the scientific details of the natural world.^[5] Her depictions of nature are not typically transcendent experiences which are interesting for how they impact the poet's selfhood, but rather descriptions of real-life phenomena which are interesting for the intellectual challenges they pose to understanding.^[1]

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.^[2]: 17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his literary criticism, famously credited Smith and her contemporary William Lisle Bowles (whose Fourteen Sonnets came out five years later, in 1789) with creating a revival of the English sonnet.^[1][2]: 18 Bowles achieved similar success to Smith, though contemporary reviews identified his form, tone, and subjects as derivatives of Smith's.^[4]: 12 The sonnet ultimately became one of the leading poetic forms of Romantic poetry,^[4]: 3 used at some point by every major Romantic poet except William Blake.^[4]: 14

Importantly, the eighteenth century revival of the sonnet now included female sonneteers.^[4]: 10 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."^[4]: 10 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.^[4]: 10 Smith was the first eighteenth-century woman to publish a volume of sonnets.^[4]: 10

Smith's sonnets were highly regarded during her lifetime.

However, after her death, Smith grew less popular as her poems came to be regarded as too sentimental. By the mid nineteenth century, she was no longer considered a major poet in her own right, but simply a "woman writer" and therefore "minor".[2] By the end of the nineteenth century, Smith was largely forgotten.^[2]: 20

With the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s, scholars rediscovered Smith's works, especially Elegiac Sonnets. These poems are now featured in all major anthologies of Romantic literature.^[1][3][5]

• Wikisource
  • Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems, Volume 1, 9th Edition, 1800.
  • Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems, Volume 2, 2nd Edition, 1800.