In this essay I will explore why female poets should be included in the Romantic canon. I will firstly look at Charlotte Smith who, arguably, began the Romanticism tradition since she predates and influenced William Wordsworth. By looking at Smith’s ‘Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex,’ from Elegiac Sonnets, and Beachy Head, I hope to express the connection between Smith’s poetry and Wordsworth’s. Anna Letitia Barbauld was another influence upon the male canonical writers. Barbauld is the more politically motivated of these two poets. By looking at ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade’ I hope to express her political intentions which Daniel P. Watkins related to visionary
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This highlights the conversation between Smith and Wordsworth’s poems. Beachy Head explores aspects of the sublime: ‘on thy stupendous summit, rock sublime’ along with the deep connection between the self and nature. Labbe states ‘by the poem’s conclusion, the speaker is not so much a representative of Smith as an aspect of the landscape itself’ highlighting how much the self becomes the natural world around it. This is mirrored in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘these beauteous forms, […] I have owed to them […] sensations sweet, | felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; | and passing even into my purer mind’. For Wordsworth, nature acts as a healer which allows for us to become ‘a living soul’ enabling the mind to ‘see into the life of things’. Another aspect of Wordworth’s poetry is nostalgia for childhood and longing for the rustic innocence of a simpler time which Smith also expresses: ‘I once was happy, when while yet a child’. Smith’s inclusion of everyday people, especially the ‘village girl’ and ‘shepherd’, give the poem a distinctly pastoral feel which longs for a rustic innocence that Smith’s experience as a ‘woman in need’ has robbed from her. It could be argued that this obvious allusion to her struggle is a political message campaigning for the rights of women against such abuse. Consequently, this last work embodied many of the tropes of Romanticism and is not simply the plea of a suffering woman but a strong demand for times to change, a case she has been making throughout her poetry, making Charlotte Smith’s place within the canon
This highlights the conversation between Smith and Wordsworth’s poems. Beachy Head explores aspects of the sublime: ‘on thy stupendous summit, rock sublime’ along with the deep connection between the self and nature. Labbe states ‘by the poem’s conclusion, the speaker is not so much a representative of Smith as an aspect of the landscape itself’ highlighting how much the self becomes the natural world around it. This is mirrored in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘these beauteous forms, […] I have owed to them […] sensations sweet, | felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; | and passing even into my purer mind’. For Wordsworth, nature acts as a healer which allows for us to become ‘a living soul’ enabling the mind to ‘see into the life of things’. Another aspect of Wordworth’s poetry is nostalgia for childhood and longing for the rustic innocence of a simpler time which Smith also expresses: ‘I once was happy, when while yet a child’. Smith’s inclusion of everyday people, especially the ‘village girl’ and ‘shepherd’, give the poem a distinctly pastoral feel which longs for a rustic innocence that Smith’s experience as a ‘woman in need’ has robbed from her. It could be argued that this obvious allusion to her struggle is a political message campaigning for the rights of women against such abuse. Consequently, this last work embodied many of the tropes of Romanticism and is not simply the plea of a suffering woman but a strong demand for times to change, a case she has been making throughout her poetry, making Charlotte Smith’s place within the canon