The Shells of Poetry

Abstract

This chapter argues that Charlotte Smith's characterizations of solitaries and lonely poet figures throughout the two works that bookend her poetic career, Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and Beachy Head (1807), demonstratively resist the idea that singular bodies can be considered containers for singular poetic speakers. Smith embraces a practice of “echoic lyric,” a mode of only seemingly solitary speech, which resists the idea that poetic voices can remain singular in loneliness—or, indeed, that loneliness, as a feeling, can be contained by individual bodies. When she presents her sonnets as spaces in which to “wake echoes,” she foregrounds her understanding of her role in the tradition of the poetry of loneliness as someone who interacts with a fundamentally polyvocal tradition, made up of fragments that clash together and make new arrangements. The poetry of loneliness, for Smith, is an echoically self-referential body of work, founded on a model of echoic community, rather than on one in which solitary figures anxiously seek to defend their territory from the threat of others' encroachments. This echoic community appears not only when groups of figures gather to sing together but also when only one putatively solitary voice speaks.