Charlotte Smith: Intertextualities

Literary Past and Present in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

“…(14: 43) It is curious that as Smith leaves the Arun, and Thomas Warton's space, her sonnet opens in adherence to her predecessor's formula by describing the joyful river scene of childhood. As she leaves the Arun, however, Thomas Warton's paradigm recedes, as does his form.…”

“…As Stuart Curran writes, Smith's appropriation of Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard" in the first of her Elegiac Sonnets "testifies to her continuing the main line of English poetic tradition." 43 Smith quotes from the end of Pope's poem, assuming the role of the future poet to whom Eloisa calls out, thereby reappropriating the female voice from the male. 44 Despite the uneasy position Smith may occupy in the male literary tradition that she invokes, male influence does not act in a creatively disabling way.…”