Fitting the battle of life

I was quite happily making notes on Charlotte Smith’s sonnets the other day, sitting in my room with just that book. Thinking I should probably add to my essay some kind of critical response to her work, I searched the library catalogue for books that might be of value, as is only normal. The ones I ended up getting out were one on ‘Romanticism, lyricism and history’, and one on the history of the sonnet. first one was pretty good, having a chapted devoted to Smith with a lengthy discussion of her Elegiac Sonnets, the subject of my essay. It did, however, reference a couple of other works - Coleridge’s Introduction to the Sonnets (1796) and Leigh Hunt’s The Book of the Sonnet (1867). Now, the quotations from these works seemed very good, and were apparently part of longer discussions about sonnets (unsurprisingly, given their titles). Writing an essay on a collection of sonnets as I am, I thought it might be prudent to read these quotations in their original context. Could I find them in UCL’s library? No.

Now this makes my life a little easier - less work to do, I suppose. But it really got me thinking about the sonnet, and Charlotte Smith’s place in the sonnet’s history. Why my library doesn’t have the complete works of STC I don’t know, but that’s beside the point. It also makes my life easier because I don’t get distracted by an exploration of a secondary source, but then that’s half the fun of English - intertextuality, which is a big pompous word describing the connections between texts, the conversation that goes on in between the pages of books in a library.

If intertextuality were a real conversation between books, I wouldn’t be able to work in a library. The noise would be deafening. It’s bad enough trying to keep myself focused on the one author when there are so many others writing about her, being influenced by her, but if that were a tangible noise in the library…imagine listening to the noise inside a conch shell, multiplied tens of times. It’s still not as loud as the talking between books.

Sometimes the conversation is really gripping, if you manage to catch a good one, like the one between Coleridge, Hunt and Charlotte Smith. The problem was, I had one whole side of the conversation and snatches of the other side, which were being reported in a completely different conversation altogether. This isn’t helpful. I could understand the gist of what Coleridge and Hunt were saying, but only according to the book I was reading. The next sentence after ‘Charlotte Smith is an alright poet’ could have been ‘But her sonnets are rubbish’. I need the other half of the conversation.

At other times the conversation between books is uninteresting. I’m sure there are people who would like to know what Smith has to say about Goethe’s Werter, but I’m not one of them. I’m more interested in her own melancholy (or at least, what is implicitly presented as her own), not her response to someone else’s presentation of melancholy, through no fault of Goethe’s. These sonnets (’Supposed to be written by Werter’) only count for 5 or so of the roughly 100 sonnets overall, so it’s no great loss. They don’t come particularly near the beginning or end to make them remarkable, so I am assuming it’s safe for me to gloss over them in my essay.

Of course the conversation you follow may well lead you on to far different pages than you begin. For instance, Coleridge’s discussion of the sonnet touches on Smith and also another poet. Why not go from Smith to Coleridge, and from Coleridge to this other poet, this other poet to another? It would be a little like literary leap-frogging, writer to writer. The web of connections would be ridiculous, though I am sure I’ve seen a website that does attempt something like that (I’ll find it tomorrow).

My point is, English can be a very discursive subject, if you let it run away with you. Sometimes it takes a little discipline (ignoring Goethe) or just blind luck (not finding Coleridge’s essay) to stay focused.

So I decide to write an essay on Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets ( first edition pub. 1786), which is a wonderful sonnet sequence I thoroughly recommend a read of. There are some really interesting ideas in there, and she had an influence on later Romantics including Wordsworth (who read the fifth edition while in his final year at Cambridge, and visited her on his way to France).

However, an essay on her poems isn’t just an essay on those poems. Oh no. Imagine my horror at the prospect of writing an essay that could include (in a vague order of importance):

• a discussion of her (100+, depending on how I’m counting) poems,
• a discussion of her poems in relation to other elegies and sonnet sequences (notably Petrarch, as she takes a lot from him)
• a discussion of her influence on later Romantics treating the same subject (think melancholy, think nightingales)
• an exploration of the feminist elements to her work (so think also some Mary Wollstonecraft).
• a look at Goethe, for the five sonnets ‘Supposed to be written by Werter’ (this isn’t going to happen as the library’s copies of the Sorrows of Werter are all in stores, and reference-only. I’m not going to read the whole thing sitting in the library under armed guard!).

All this in 3-4,000 words, constituting 1/160th of my overall degree (16 tutorial essays over 2 years is one module out of ten). Great. Time to knuckle down!