SOURCE: Hoagwood, Terence Allan. In an Introduction to Beachy Head with Other Poems, by Charlotte Smith, pp. 3-11. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1993.

In the following essay, Hoagwood describes the content of Smith's poetry as surpassing the usual poetic concerns to embrace social, political, and intellectual issues.

Charlotte Smith, an influential poet and extraordinarily successful novelist, was the author of sixty-three volumes, altogether,¹ including bestseller novels with social themes (saliently feminist and politically revolutionary themes) and books of widely-admired poetry, of which the volume here reprinted was her last. Admirers of her work included Sir Walter Scott, Queen Caroline, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Smith regarded her own poetry as more important than her fiction; she not only established anew for English literature the importance of the sonnet and the sonnet sequence (in ways that were formative for the subsequent work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, by...