Selected Poems
by Charlotte Smith
144pp, Carcanet/Fyfield Books, £7.95

Charlotte Turner Smith was, according to Wordsworth, "a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely either to be acknowledged or remembered". In the late 18th century she was a highly popular novelist and poet; largely forgotten for many years, she is now enjoying a well-deserved revival of interest. She is credited in academic circles with having revived the sonnet form, dusting it off ready for use by Romantic poets such as Wordsworth.

Her Elegiac Sonnets, first published in 1784 when she was confined to debtors' gaol by the failures of her husband, harps continuously on the theme of her own suffering. The popularity of this volume caused her to expand and reissue it many times, but emotionally the sonnets never moved beyond the typically broken-backed final line of "Written at the Close of Spring": "Ah! why has happiness - no second spring!" Despite the monotony of theme, there is a great deal of variety in the music of Smith's sonnets, both intricacy in her experiments with form and metrical ingenuity in lines such as these from "Written at Weymouth in Winter": "The chill waves whiten in the sharp north-east; / Cold, cold the night-blast comes, with sullen sound".

Debts and demands dominated Smith's literary career. Born into a wealthy family, educated to expect privilege and ease, she was married off at 16 ("sold, a legal prostitute", she later claimed) to the son of a West Indies merchant as part of her father's scheme to cover his gambling debts. Her marriage to a man who proved even better at losing money than her father not surprisingly failed, and she turned to writing as a way of earning money while expressing her woes. She produced 10 novels in as many years to try to support her 10 children. In addition, she published two other volumes of verse and several fascinating didactic works for children, which mixed poetry and natural history.

Fair dues should be paid to these achievements, and charity extended to her because of the many burdens she bore. Her life was consumed by a labyrinthine legal battle about a legacy which was supposed to provide for her and her children. The case, which was not resolved until after her death in 1806, provided a model for Dickens's Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. Yet the way she exploits her life for her art, and manipulates the sympathy of her readers and supporters, would try all but the most forbearing. It is hard to extend unqualified sympathy to a woman who protests that she cannot afford food and coal, then hires a French governess. Her art echoes with the whine of aired grievances. A rival poet, Anna Seward, wrote acidly of Mrs C Smith's "everlasting lamentables, which she calls sonnets ... Never were poetical whipt syllabubs, in black glasses, so eagerly swallowed by the odd taste of the public."

However, while some of her sonnets might appear to be airy nothings, her ambitious long poems "The Emigrants" and "Beachy Head" are much more substantial fare and expand on her personal situation in more complex and compelling ways.

"The Emigrants" (1793) parallels the fate of those driven out of France by the revolution with the sufferings of victims of the British state machinery. Judith Willson, in her intelligent and informative introduction, praises Smith's "command of scale and focus, from the grand and universal to the personal and circumstantial". At its worst, this combination of personal and political amounts to no more than Smith's self-centred appropriation of the sufferings of others: "... they, like me / From fairer hopes and happier prospects driven". Here "me" takes priority over "they". At its best, it is manifested in an understanding of the way the individual is enmeshed in a larger system, both natural and political.

"Beachy Head" (published in 1807) is even more impressive and far more successful in its combination of the personal and the universal and history both natural and political. Looking out at day-break over the English Channel from Beachy Head - a cliff which, as Willson points out, the ageing poet could no longer have climbed - Smith surveys geological time, meditating on the forces that divided Britain from the continental land mass. When she catches sight of a ship returning from the Orient, she follows a train of thought which leads her to a critique of imperialism. Returning from the east by following the sun setting in the west, Smith relates the history of Britain's proud defiance of successive waves of invaders. These broad meditations and consciously rhetorical tropes are grounded by a strong sense of personal presence. They are also given point by the fact that Britain was at war with France and feared invasion at any moment.

It is her closeness of observation that distinguishes this poem both from her more self-centred poetry and from more conventional prospect poetry. When Smith introduces a lovelorn poet into the scene, she situates him among poetic ruins, but also in a scientifically accurate natural environment - one, moreover, inhabited by hard-working labourers:

   "...he was wont
   To wander forth, listening the evening sounds
   Of rushing milldam, or the distant team,
   Or nightjar, chasing fern-flies; the tired hind
   Pass'd him at nightfall, wondering he should sit
   On the hill top so late".

The accuracy of this poetic observation is reinforced by her own annotation to "fern-flies". In a long note, she discusses previous poetic treatments of natural noises and digresses into a description of the "Fern owl, or Goatsucker" with its long serrated middle toe, then retails peasant superstitions about diseases of cattle. Further reinforcing her authority, she corrects her previ ous allusion to the owl in one of her sonnets: "I was mistaken in supposing it as visible in November; it is a migrant, and leaves this country in August." When she notes elsewhere in this poem, relating the popular and the botanical name, that "The grass called Sheep's Fescue (Festuca ovina) clothes these downs with the softest turf", we can be sure that she has lain on this turf, book in hand. Not only did Smith grow up on the South Downs, she has read up about them and wishes to educate her readers about the natural and moral significance of the landscape.

Unfortunately, Smith's annotations are not fully reproduced in this edition. Some of them are briefly summarised and a few other facts are added by the editor, but the annotation is light. This leaves us with an uncluttered text and probably aims to meet the needs and interests of a broad audience. However, it is regrettable given the convincing description in the editor's introduction of how the notes are integral to the poet's imaginative vision of the landscape as a repository of human and natural history; and we cannot experience the poem as its first readers did, distracted from the verse by the notes. Willson suggests that Smith's "non-linear, associative, diachronic mode", "is perhaps a peculiarly female language, blurring the grand narrative into multiplicity". Even without the annotations, this is a good introduction to a writer whose achievement is beginning to receive the recognition it deserves. Studying such writers might help to blur "the grand narrative" of Romanticism, and alert readers to the multiplicity of poetic voices that were heard at the end of the 18th century.

· Judith Hawley is a senior lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London