期刊名称：Aphra Behn Online : Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830
电子版ISSN：2157-7129
出版年度：2011
卷号：1
出版社：Aphra Behn Society
摘要：Two hundred years after their publications captivated the British reading public, Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784-1811) and Anna Seward’s Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799) are generally regarded as landmarks in the late eighteenth-century sonnet revival.[1] But while both poets are usually mentioned in discussions of this phenomenon, Smith has recently been honored as the chief influence on her romantic successors, and probably the better poet of the two. Smith’s influence is unquestionable; the latter claim, arguable. Because we view both poets in the aftermath of the romantic triumph, we tend to adopt a teleological view of literary history that values poets according to how closely they approximate or anticipate the romantics. Smith’s self-referential emphasis, persistent melancholia, and vaunted uniqueness echo throughout Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s poems and down through Byron’s. Seward, measured against Smith’s proto-romantic qualities, is judged the lesser poet. But by measuring Seward against Smith, we ignore Seward’s adherence to well-established principles and her development of the aesthetics of sensibility. At times, her sonnets argue critical opinions or contemplate moral insights drawn from her correspondence, but almost every sonnet, regardless of theme, illustrates Seward’s preference for poetry that connects the self to others and to the surrounding world rather than emphasizing, as Smith does, the individual’s isolation. Seward conducted her campaign against Smith in the guise of Milton’s champion, defending his sonnets’ form and occasional topics as the models for her own. By studying Seward’s defense of the Miltonic or “legitimate” sonnet, we can recover the ways her favored sonnet form supported and advanced her beliefs about the function of poetry, the role of the poet, and why Smith’s approach to the sonnet involved stakes so high that Seward vehemently condemned Smith’s sonnets.
