Selected Poems: Charlotte Smith

by Charlotte Turner Smith, Judith Willson (Editor)

After years of literary neglect, Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) is now being recognized as a major poet and modern figure whose Romantic sensibility is an expression of a specifically female experience. This selection provides an ideal introduction to the full range of her work, from her influential sonnets and poems for children to extracts from her French Revolution poem The Emigrants and the full text of her astonishing masterwork Beachy Head.

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2006

About the author

Charlotte Turner Smith was an English Romantic poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Charlotte Turner Smith was a phenomenal woman; she left her violent and profligate husband, and raised her children on her own, earning a living by her writing. According to Wikipedia, she has been credited with “transforming the sonnet into an expression of woeful sentiment”. No kidding, most of the pieces in this collection are so sad. The language is also difficult, there were many words I had never heard before, and…I’m not gonna lie…it was hard going at times. Still, reading poetry out loud is fun, and I did learn things.

[Nick Traynor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very difficult to read because it was so complex, a testament to Charlotte Smith’s formidable intelligence. I found it difficult to follow, sad a lot of the time and there were so many words I didn’t know. 18th century poetry is HARD. But I learned some things.

[Tabitha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this book for a university class, and while I’ve never been a big fan of poetry, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. There are points in it that can cause the reader to struggle to make sense of the poems, such as when she chooses to delve into information of flora instead of finishing the poem-when it might make more sense adding the information at the end. However, once you are able to get passed that, you can see that many of her sentiments she writes about in her poems are sentiments that many people her age (whether late teen years or an elder adult) all share, unifying and binding people together in just a few stanzas.