Alone and Pensive, I Delight to Stray : Charlotte Smith's Nocturnal Sonnets in a Wider Literary Context

Abstract

This thesis aims to place the nocturnal settings of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets in a wider literary context by comparing her poetry to nocturnal poetry written prior to, contemporary with and after her literary career. It uses close reading to compare Smith’s poetry with nocturnal poems by other authors which have contributed to the genre of the English nocturnal in order to determine how Smith has contributed to the shaping of the genre. The first chapter focuses on Smith’s predecessors such as Thomson, Milton, Young and Anne Finch, and how their poetry has influenced Smith’s. The second chapter focuses on Smith’s contemporaries such as Anna Seward and Helen Maria Williams, while the third chapter views Smith’s nocturnal sonnets in the context of her influence on the later literary giants Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.