SOURCE: Anderson, John M. “In the Churchyard, Outside the Church: Personal Mysticism and Ecclesiastical Politics in Two Poems by Charlotte Smith.” In Seeing into the Life of Things: Essays on Literature and Religious Experience, edited by John L. Mahoney, pp. 195-209. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Anderson explores Smith's use of the conventional tropes associated with religious poetry to address social and political concerns.

Much of what we call great poetry, the poetry that stands most securely at the center of the canons of literature however much change may occur on its fringes, owes its stability to the fact that it is grounded in a foundation of shared narratives, genres, and tropes acquired in the course of a classical education. Writers who have been denied access to such an education (for reasons, most usually, of race, class, or gender) have often grounded their work...