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The essay argues that typical readings of Smith as a poet writing in a traditional Romantic mode, creating lyrics that depict a melancholic individual subject drawing inspiration and education from the natural world, risk marginalizing her. Recognizing exile as both biographical reality and literary trope is central to an understanding of Smith’s verse, for she also wrote poetry with a significant political agenda, one that distinguishes her from her early Romantic contemporaries and challenges the parameters of English Romantic nationalist discourse.
June 2010: Monica Smith-Hart (Ph.D. University of Georgia) is Assistant Professor of English at West Texas A&M University, where she teaches courses in British Romanticism and Victorian Literature. She is the author of “Protest and Performance: Ann Yearsley’s Poems on Several Occasions” (The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ashgate, 2009). Her current book project centers on the ways that Victorian poets transform the Byronic hero into a potent emblem of national identity and political engagement, a figure deeply devoted to ideas of nation and home but not defined by them.
