Lyric: Self-Abnegation in the Sonnets of Clare and Smith

In this chapter I tackle the ‘quintessential Romantic mode’, the lyric (Michael O’Neill). I focus on one poetic genre that is often used in the lyrical mode: the sonnet. In traditional accounts of the Romantic sonnet, William Wordsworth’s sonnets are treated as the central case, and are interpreted as self-enclosed poems that necessitate their own structure. In this way, the Romantic sonnet has served as a core example of self-representation and the necessary self. In this chapter, I show how two Romantic poets pursued a different course, destructuring the sonnet to convey the contingent self. Charlotte Smith used her Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1800) to convey self-contradictory or even self-destructive states of mind. John Clare, meanwhile, wrote hundreds of loosely structured sonnets that dissolve into sights, sounds and feelings. Smith’s most characteristic sonnets are monstrous. Clare’s are multiple. In Sect. 4.1, I consider the sonnet at the level of genre. Smith and Clare adapt the generic conventions of the sonnet to construct different authorial identities. Smith treats the sonnet as a prison, Clare as a borderless garden. In Sect. 4.2, I consider the narrative mode of their sonnets. Smith and Clare use sequencing and paratexts to either invite or resist narrativisation of their poems. Smith invites the reader to interpret her sonnets as a self-destructive autobiography. Clare prevents the reader from joining his sonnets into any coherent narrative, preferring to portray recurrent patterns of experience. Finally, in Sects. 4.3 and 4.4, I turn to the lyrical mode of these sonnets. Using collostructional analysis, I explore how Smith and Clare use place- and person-deixis to convey different flavours of subjectivity. Throughout the analysis I use Wordsworth’s sonnets as a point of comparison and contrast. While Wordsworth’s achievement in the sonnet is undeniable, the poetics of Smith and Clare are equally remarkable, and demonstrate that there was more than one tradition of Romantic sonneteering.