The Nightjar's Shriek: Nature's Variety in the Sonnets of John Clare and Charlotte Smith

In this article, I compare Smith and Clare’s sonnets to reassess our grand narratives of the Romantic sonnet revival. Using digital text analysis, I reveal distinctive features of their form and style. Both Smith and Clare give voice to new kinds of lyric consciousness in their sonnets. Smith’s sonnets explore unresolved contradictions of the psyche. Clare’s couplet sonnets set forth an objective and communal way of seeing the world. Text analysis reveals how subtly they remade the sonnet to embody these new ways of seeing. Both represent alternatives to Wordsworth’s “orbicular” notion of the sonnet’s form, and have great significance for our understanding of varieties of Romantic lyricism and Romantic selfhood.