Beachy Head

Beachy Head

When it comes to many of the essential ideas explored during the Romantic Movement, are women poets ever accredited in their influence over such themes? This is a question that arises when reading Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head.” The poem is so monumental, so breathtaking in its innovation, that one cannot help but to wonder why it is not more renowned in English Literature. Considering that the poem was composed around 1806 just before her death, “Beachy Head” truly strikes modern chords in its themes:

From a modern experience of Romanticism, nurtured by the sometimes oblique narrative strategies of its major poets, a work that begins atop a massive feature of the landscape and ends immured within it bears a remarkable coherence, the more so

since in no poem of the period can one find so powerfulan impulse to resolve the self

into nature. (Curran xxvii)

Although critics may not recognize it as a work equal to that of the major Romantic poets, it is not surprising that both Wordsworth and Keats were greatly influenced by this great poem.

The overall genius expressed by Charlotte Smith in “Beachy Head” can be attributed to her great fascination and love for the landscape of Sussex. The very nature of the poet’s artistic immersion in such a common, specific area is itself evidence of her understanding of a central Romantic idea. The natural beauty that inspires her is not that of some faraway classical monument, it is what she sees in her everyday walks through the county she lives in. Charlotte Smith uses the familiar landscape of southeast England to conjure up incredible allusions to Britain’s great past. She does this with the help of an extremely specific knowledge of the botany, archeology, an...

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...overlooked despite how far above many critics place the works of the more renowned poets.

Works Cited and Consulted

Curran, Stuart, ed. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. New York: Oxford, 1993.

Fay, Elizabeth A. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Malden: Blackwell, 1998.

Feldman, Paula R., ed. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997.

Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.

Linkin, Harriet K., and Stephen Behrendt, ed. Romanticism and Women poets:

Opening the Doors of Reception. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Wilson, Carol Shiner. “Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith.” Re-

Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776-1837. Ed. Carol Wilson and Joel Haefner. Philadelphia: Universityof Philadelphia Press, 1994.