Many solitaries populate Charlotte Smith’s poems: perhaps the most famous are the hermits in her poem Beachy Head. In this talk, I follow Smith’s solitaries through the lonely landscapes of her poetry—along riverbanks, into caves, and finally into the sea—tracing how she repeatedly uses the image of the “shell” as a conceit for the poet’s lyre, in order to theorize lyric. Although Smith seems to emphasize solitude as singularity, I show how she makes supposedly singular voices multiple. Allusion, quotation, and self-quotation abound, constituting a playful, echoic poetics, in which the same lines are sometimes voiced by different characters, echoing across the distance between different texts. Her vision of loneliness questions the assumption that singular minds are constrained by singular bodies. Challenging our understanding of Romantic loneliness, Smith presents a model for how Romantic poets were lonely together.

Amelia Worsley is an Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College. Her current book project, Lonely Poets and their Publics: Being Alone Together in British Romantic Poetry, focuses on Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and various abolition poets. She has also written articles about loneliness in Shakespeare, Milton, and D.W. Winnicott.