SOURCE: Raycroft, Brent. “From Charlotte Smith to Nehemiah Higginbottom: Revising the Genealogy of the Early Romantic Sonnet.” European Romantic Review 9, no. 3 (summer 1998): 363-92.

In the following essay, Raycroft examines Smith's long absence from the literary canon and her recent reinstatement as one of the earliest Romantic poets.

I

This essay is primarily about writing Charlotte Smith back into the history of the early Romantic sonnet, but it is structured around a group of texts, critical and poetic, from the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. After sketching briefly the interconnected fame of Charlotte Smith and William Lisle Bowles, I introduce in this first section Coleridge's primary reference to Smith and a number of his more copious references to William Lisle Bowles, the latter constituting what I call the Coleridge-Bowles connection. Most of these citations are clustered in the mid-1790's, the main exception being Coleridge's discussion of Bowles's influence...