The Poetry of Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Smith was one of England's first Romantic poets. Among other legacies, her Elegiac Sonnets, an instant success, helped revive the English sonnet, and her novels—of which she wrote ten—helped form genre conventions for the gothic novel. Popular and prolific in her lifetime, she faded into obscurity after her death; only in recent history has her unique talent and influence been widely celebrated once again.

Collected here is a sample of Smith's masterful poetry. Melancholic, infused with a reverence for the natural world, and critical of the period's patriarchy, these are the words of a woman who William Wordsworth described as a poet "to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered."