1807: The Art of Poetry on a New Plan

Abstract

As Chapter 1 argued, Smith and Wordsworth established the Romantic fascination with experimentation by engaging creatively with the physical properties of poetry. Smith’s initial, tentative novelties of the late 1780s, and her more assured and thoroughgoing innovations as Elegiac Sonnets progressed and enlarged, found their counterpart in Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads. Both poets created poetic hybrids of resonant, sounding poetry. For both, this activity facilitated an understanding of poetry as fluid, flexible, and changeable. Their willingness to work with their material demonstrates that both poets participated in the period’s general interest in understanding causes, effects, and principles, and in so doing bedded in experimentation as a value of Romanticism. Their interest in the possibilities of hybridization is one response to what Sophie Thomas has called “a new disciplinary and classificatory impulse,” something she associates in particular with the establishment of museums and public shows that characterize the period.1 In 1807, both poets published (Smith posthumously) collections of poetry that offered a follow-up to their 1790s poetics: in Beachy Head: with Other Poems and Poems, in Two Volumes, Smith and Wordsworth moved from hybridity to taxonomy, their books exploring the interrelations between the making of poetry, the naming of poetry, the science of poetry, and the impact of poetry.2