Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet

Front matter

Romantic Reconfigurations:

Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850

Form, Place and Tradition in the Late Eighteenth Century

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 The Eighteenth-Century Sonnet 11 2 Tradition 29 Nightingales 30

Streams 39

River Arun 43

Chapter One

This chapter tells the story of the sonnet in the eighteenth century, and Smith’s role in it. In contrast to the dominant narrative we have inherited of a sudden revival of the sonnet by Smith in 1784, I show that the renewed interest in the form was more gradual. Some aspects of the eighteenth-century sonnet — such as Warton’s poems and influence, and the popularity of Petrarch — have been addressed in recent criticism, while Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson’s anthology A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival provides a valuable overview of poems in the form from 1750 to 1850.' However, critical interest in the sonnet as a ‘Romantic’ form has meant that the earlier history of the sonnet form in the eighteenth century has often been overlooked, and a full history has not been made since R. D. Havens’s The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (1922), in which a chapter covers the sonnet and a bibliography lists poems published in the form between 1700 and 1800.’ Havens’s history is comprehensive and useful, and includes women writers long before their recovery by feminist critics, yet it is also necessarily old-fashioned and outdated. Havens celebrates the sonnets of Warton, Thomas Russell, and John Codrington Bampfylde, while Smith’s sonnets perplex — ‘elegies’ which are ‘quite impossible’ — and he puts Smith’s use of English and irregular sonnet

' Fairer, Organising Poetry; Edoardo Zuccato, Petrarch in Romantic England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson (eds.), A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750—1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

> The nineteenth-century sonnet has been the subject of monographs by Jennifer Ann Wagner, A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century English Sonnet (London: Associated University Presses, 1996); Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet; Billone, Little Songs; and Marianne Van Remoortel, Lives of the Sonnet, 1787-1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

forms down to her ‘unwillingness to work hard over her productions.’ He cannot deny her influence, however: in ‘encouraging the use of these easier arrangements of rimes’ and ‘in fastening the elegiac mood upon the genre’, for the remainder of the century ‘she is a force to be reckoned with’ (p. 504). When Smith is later fully reinstated into the literary canon, her status has of course changed. In studies such as Poetic Form and British Romanticism, Smith is at the forefront of the sonnet revival, and earlier sonnets sit uneasily alongside hers rather than the other way around. Here, I pay due attention to the earlier decades of the eighteenth century, while illuminating Smith’s achievement.

As Havens’s title suggests, the sonnet revival was initially largely bound up with the popularity of Milton. The argument of this chapter is that eighteenth-century interest in the sonnet was inspired not only by Milton but by a new interest in the literature of the past more widely. Fairer has written much about what he sees as a return to or recovery of the past in the early decades of the eighteenth century:

In locating the bedrock of their native tradition, poets like the Wartons, Gray, Collins and Akenside felt they were simultaneously recovering a more pristine poetry that had become overlaid by the prescriptions of the ‘petits maîtres of French criticism. [...] The mid-century return to the literary tradition of Spenser and Milton was not a move away from the classical, but towards a ‘classic’ literary past of great originals.‘

This return to the literary past was realised through form as the heroic couplet was gradually overtaken in popularity by Spenserian stanzas, odes, and sonnets. The major poets of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including John Dryden and Pope, avoided the sonnet. To Dryden, the ‘Masculine Vigour’ of English is suited to ‘Heroick Poetry’, yet the ‘light and trifling’ French is ‘more proper for Sonnets, Madrigals and Elegies’, and Pope alludes to the low status of the form in his reference to the ‘starv’d hackney sonneteer’ in An Essay on Criticism (1711). The avoidance of the sonnet by the poets of ‘neo-classical’ age is often read as the basis of both the form’s

3 R. D. Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), p. 504.

4 David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789 (Harlow: Longman, 2003), p. 150. See Fairer’s chapter 8 more widely on this theme and his chapter “Creating a National Poetry: The Tradition of Spenser and Milton’, in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 177-201.

> John Dryden, The Works of Virgil: Containing his Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis [...], 3 vols. (London: J. Tonson, 1721), II: p. 415; Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), line 419.

widespread disuse and its newfound popularity, enabling its appropriators to work against the poetic models of Pope and Samuel Johnson. In Peri Bathous; or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728) Pope writes that ‘the same Humours which vent themselves in Summer in Ballads and Sonnets, are condens’d by the Winters Cold into Pamphlets and Speeches’ (Major Works, p.99).° As Mark Raymond points out, the sonnet (with the ballad) seems to epitomise poetry in its lowest form, connected with the body rather than with intellectual activity, yet ‘the very terms with which Pope would condemn the sonnet, its natural expression of passion, would within Romanticism represent a major objective of the “new” activity of poetic language.” The turn to the literary forms of the past and later emphasis on natural expression and sensibility underpin the sonnet’s renewed popularity, yet this does not necessarily involve a wholesale departure from Pope and ‘neoclassicism’. While some poets, such as Thomas Warton, did seek to reach back through form in a way that avoided Pope, in the hands of other writers the sonnet was able to coincide with and follow what had come before. Smith refers to her sonnets as ‘effusions’ (p. 9), suggesting spontaneity and expression (effusion is ‘the act of pouring out’ both water and words, according to Johnson’s Dictionary) yet her first sonnet ends with a quotation from Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard’ and the first edition of Elegiac Sonnets includes a poem, “The Origin of Flattery’, in heroic couplets.*

In addition to Milton, it was through the influence of Spenser that many eighteenth-century sonneteers turned to the form. There was also a separate — although concomitant — interest in Italian sonnets, particularly those of Petrarch. Conversely, Shakespeare’s sonnets were little known and widely disliked until later in the century; his popularity and place in the canon stemmed only from his plays. His sonnets were omitted from all the complete works edited by Nicholas Rowe, Pope, Thomas Hanmer, Lewis Theobald, William Warburton, Edward Capell, and Johnson. The sonnets had been made available in 1710, yet it was through Edmond Malone’s two-volume ‘Supplement’ to George Steevens’s revised edition of The Plays of William Shakspeare [sic] (1778) that they reached a wider readership.” At the

€ Pope’s ‘hoax’, found sonnet, supposedly written by Milton, presents a counterpart to the numerous later sonnets more seriously influenced by Milton: ‘Sonnet written upon occasion of the Plague, and found on a Glass-Window at Chalfont. (In Imitation of Milton.) was published in volume one of Thomas Birch’s A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton (1738), and also in The Poetical Calendar for August 1763. The ‘sonnet’ is actually comprised of two abab quatrains.

7 Mark Raymond, “The Romantic Sonnet Revival: Opening the Sonnet’s Crypt’, Literature Compass, 4: 3 (2007), p. 730.

8 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London: J. and P. Knapton, etc., 1755), I, sv. ‘EFFU’SION’.

” The 1709 publication was by Charles Gildon in an unauthorised supplement to Nicholas invitation of Malone, however, Steevens added notes to the supplement in which he condemns not only Shakespeare’s sonnets but the form in general: ‘perhaps, indeed, quaintness, obscurity, and tautology are to be regarded as the constituent parts of this exotick species? Malone tentatively defends the sonnets, acknowledging that there are ‘many beautiful lines scattered through these poems’ if readers permit themselves to enjoy poems that are not in ‘blank verse or heroick couplets’, still the predominant literary forms at this time (p. 685). Steevens completed his condemnation of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his fourth edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare (1793), however, published largely in retaliation to Malone’s 1790 edition, writing in the preface that ‘the strongest act of Parliament that could be framed’ would not force the editors to include them." They remained little-read until the nineteenth century, when they slowly grew in popularity.

Thomas Edwards (1699-1757) turned to the form after reading Spenser’s sonnets, yet soon after discovered and thereafter used the Italian form, ‘drawing from the same fountains as Milton drew from’. Thirteen sonnets by Edwards were included in the second volume of the second edition of Robert Dodsley’s popular anthology A Collection of Poems in ‘Three Volumes. By Several Hands in 1748 and again in 1755. In 1765 twenty-seven sonnets, plus the thirteen sonnets already in print, were published in the posthumous sixth edition of Edwards's The Canons of Criticism [...], an attack on William Warburton’s editing of Shakespeare, and a final four in John Nichols’s A Select Collection of Poems (1780). In sonnet XXXVIII Edwards refers to Spenser as ‘the sweetest Bard that ever sung’, and his sonnets frequently celebrate the native tradition of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, as in sonnet XVII: ‘do not Thou native language scorn; | In which great Shakespear, Spenser, Milton sang.“ Four of

Rowe and Jacob Tonson’s The Works of Mr. William Shakespear [sic] (1709), later appended to Alexander Pope’s editions of 1725 and 1728.

10 George Steevens, note in Edmond Malone, ed., Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare’s Plays [...], 2 vols. (London: C. Bathurst, etc., 1780), I: p. 682.

" George Steevens, preface to The Plays of William Shakspeare, 4th edn., 15 vols. (London: T. Longman, etc., 1793), I: p. viii.

12 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ed., The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson [...], 6 vols. (London: R. Phillips, 1804), III: p. 91.

13 Another sonnet precedes those of Edwards in the Collection: ‘A Sonnet. Imitated from the Spanish of Lopez de Vega’, by Richard Roderick (bap. 1710, d. 1756), a friend of Edwards. The Spanish poet Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was known for his witty, satiric, epigrammatic sonnets, and the sonnet translated by Roderick is a sonnet on the sonnet form itself, counting down each of its fourteen lines. Prior to Edwards, sonnets were being written, yet remained in manuscript until much later, by Philip Yorke, Charles Yorke, Benjamin Stillingfleet, and of course Thomas Gray, all indebted to Milton (Havens, Influence of Milton, pp. 489-92).

14 Thomas Edwards, ‘Sonnet XVII. To the same [Isaac Hawkins Browne]’, in The Canons

Edwards’s published sonnets take the Spenserian form and the remaining forty-eight sonnets take the Italian form.

When Edwards’s sonnets are included posthumously in The Canons of Criticism, it is observed that they are “formed [...] upon the model of the Italians of the good age, and of the Imitators among us, Spenser and Milton’ (sig. A2v.). At this time, using the sonnet was perceived to amount to copying or imitation. In his edition of Spenser’s poetry John Hughes remarks on the sonnets that ‘[hlere again we find our Author copying the Jtalians, while Edwards’s own letters belie a concern with imitation: ‘I hope I shall never be ashamed of imitating such great originals as Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. [...] But why is my writing of sonnets, imitation any more than theirs?’ (Correspondence, III, p. 91). As well as in form, Edwards’s sonnets also follow Milton in a major respect thematically, for out of Edwards’s fifty-two published sonnets all but ten are written ‘to’ someone, ranging from public figures such as the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord chancellor to Edwards’s close family and friends. While place does inform some of Edwards’s sonnets, the emphasis in these is elsewhere, such as on the promotion of retirement in sonnet I “To R. Owen Cambridge, Esq.’ and contentment in XXI ‘For the Root-House at Wrest’.'° A sense of loss and isolation imbues several of Edwards’s sonnets, and Edwards often presents himself as part of something outmoded and defunct, which is matched by his use of the moribund sonnet form. This is particularly apparent in his best-known — and also most personal and melancholy — sonnet V, ‘On a Family-Picture’:

It seems that like a Column left alone, The tottering remnant of some splendid Fane, Scape’d from the fury of the barbarous Gaul, And wasting Time, which has the rest o’erthrown; Amidst our House’s ruins I remain

Single, unpropp’d, and nodding to my fall. (Canons, lines 9-14)

Edwards’s poignant position as the last member of his family matches his literary position as almost the only writer to appropriate the sonnet at this time, the last ‘tottering remnant of some splendid fane’, and in sonnet XLIV “To Matthew Banyard’ he looks to his own death and burial. Several others of Criticism; and Glossary, Being a Supplement to Mr. Warburton’s Edition of Shakespear [sic], 6th edn. (London: C. Bathurst, 1758), lines 9-10.

5 John Hughes, ‘Remarks on the Shepherd’s Calendar, &., in The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser. In Six Volumes. With a Glossary Explaining the Old and Obscure Words Publish’d by Mr. Hughes, 6 vols. (London: J. Tonson, 1715), I: p. cviii.

16 See also sonnet XXV “To the most Honoroble the Lady Marchioness Grey. The Hermitage at Turrick to the Root-House at Wrest’, and XXIX “To W. Heberden, M. D?

are ‘elegiac, including IX “To the Memory of Mrs. M. Paice’, XXXIII “To the Memory of John Hampden, Esq’, XXV “To the most Honoroble the Lady Marchioness Grey, and XXXVII ‘On the Death of Miss J. M’. Edwards supported and encouraged women writers, becoming acquainted with Hester Mulso (1727-1801), later Chapone, and Susanna Highmore (1725-1812), later Duncombe, upon entering Richardson’s circle in 1748. In letters and poems, Edwards encouraged them to write and publish their work and, indeed, both Highmore and Duncombe went on to publish sonnets (among other poems).'”

Thomas Warton’s sonnets were also published in Dodsley’s 1755 Collection, and his influential Poems. A New Edition (1777) reprints the two sonnets published by Dodsley alongside seven new sonnets, as well as ‘miscellaneous poems’ and odes. A later reviewer observes that:

Whether it arose from his imagination having been early seized and taken possession of by our earlier poets, or, perhaps, from having been strongly struck during his residence at Oxford, with the picturesque grandeur of the collegiate buildings [...] certain it is, his Poems show a strong predilection for the days of chivalry and romance."

The reviewer highlights the interconnectedness of place and the literary past in Warton’s poetry. Warton entered Trinity College, Oxford in 1744 and remained there for the rest of his life, becoming a perpetual fellow in 1753 and professor of poetry between 1757 and 1767. He frequently wrote on Oxford itself in publications ranging from humorous guidebooks to serious biographies of men associated with Trinity College, as well as producing the celebratory poem The Triumph of Isis (1750). It was at Oxford that Warton pursued his interest in the literary past, firstly in Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754, rev. 1762) and then in his three-volume The History of English Poetry (1774-1781). Contrary to Edwards, whose use of the sonnet and ‘imitation’ of earlier writers is beset by anxiety (he described his use of the sonnet as a

Hester Mulso’s (non-sonnet) poem ‘Occasioned by reading Sonnets written in the Stile and Manner of Spenser, by T. Edwards, Esq; 1749’ was published in Hester Chapone, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse [...] (1775), with Edward’s reply ‘To Miss H.M.’. There are two further sonnets in her Miscellanies, one original “To a Robin-Redbreast’ and a translation of an Italian sonnet from the Rime degli Arcadi anthology of the Arcadia Academy (1716). Susanna Highmore published three sonnets (as well as five non-sonnet poems) in volume seven of The Poetical Calendar in 1763; all are translations — two of sonnets by Petrarch and one of a sonnet by the Italian woman poet Faustina Maratti Zappi (1679/80-1745), another member of the Arcadia Academy. She wrote two further sonnets, both addressed to Edwards, although one exists in manuscript only, and the other, dated 1749, was not published until 1821.

18 Anonymous, review of The Poems on Various Subjects, of Thomas Warton, B. D., The Critical Review, 10 (1794), p. 20.

‘transgression’, Correspondence, UI: p. 91), Warton’s sonnets and other poems are characterised by a positive relationship with the literary past. Place also has much greater significance. Fairer has shown how the settings of Warton’s poems dramatise the way he reaches into the past, uncovering obscure sources, as in his ode “Written at Vale-Royal Abby in Cheshire’ (1777), in which the speaker enters the ‘inmost cell’ ‘to pluck the grey moss from the mantled stone.” His sonnets display a defining interest in places and artefacts of historical interest, such as those “Written at Stonehenge’, “Written after seeing Wilton-House’, “On King Arthurs Round Table’, and “Written in a Blank Leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon’, and his own past in “To the River Lodon’.”° In contrast to Edwards’s ‘tottering remnant of some splendid fane’, the last in a disintegrating tradition, to Warton remains and remnants become special places to be revived. Samuel Johnson offered his view on Warton’s 1777 volume in a poem of the same year:

Phrase that time hath flung away, Uncouth words in disarray,

Trick’d in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.”

Warton’s poetry was perceived (fondly) as antiquarian and outmoded in both form and style. His sonnet “Written in a Blank Leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon is not only ‘written’ in Sir William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (1655), the fruits of Dugdale’s own antiquarian research (on historical sites — cathedrals, churches, abbeys, and monasteries — of 1640s England), but also a defence of the pursuit and celebration of its pleasures:

Nor rough, nor barren, are the winding ways Of hoar Antiquity, but strown with flowers. (Poems. A New Edition, lines 13-14)

Warton’s sonnet rhymes abbaababcdcdcd, which is typical of his use of form: based around an Italian octave-sestet structure, yet deviating from the strict model, and enjambing line-endings and the octave-sestet divide. Warton’s

9 Thomas Warton, ‘Ode II. Written at Vale-Royal Abby in Cheshire’, Poems. A New Edition, with Additions (London: T. Becket, 1777), lines 74-5.

2 The River Loddon (rather than Lodon) is a tributary of the River Thames. Its source is in Basingstoke (where Warton was born and grew up) and it runs through Hampshire and Berkshire, meeting the Thames near the village of Wargrave.

21 Samuel Johnson, ‘On Archaism in Poetry’, in The Oxford Authors: Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), lines 5-8. The poem is often given the title “Lines on Thomas Warton’s Poems’.

model for the sonnet was Milton, whose sonnets he edited in 1785, yet, unlike most contemporary commentators, he does not trace a lineage from Petrarch to Milton, and disliked Petrarch’s sonnets.” Warton’s resistance to a fully legitimate use of form contrasts with Edwards’s rigidity and reflects the sense of his sonnets in content; place and the past are experienced in an exploratory, ‘winding’, and ‘pensive’ way, and the subjects of his sonnets have often been obscured or worn away. In sonnet VIII ‘On King Arthurs Round-table at Winchester’ time has “fade[d] the British characters away’ (line 12), and in sonnet IX “To the River Lodon’ ‘pensive memory traces back the round’ (line 6) — both from the 1777 Poems. Warton’s sonnets are interested in capturing the partial, forgotten, and obscure, mimed by Warton’s use of form, which itself is faded and incomplete, another pleasurable, exploratory ‘tracing’ of the past.

In the ‘Advertisement’ to his brother’s Poems on Various Subjects (1791), which included the sonnets, Joseph Warton (bap. 1722, d. 1800) wrote that a ‘reader of taste will easily perceive, that the ingenious Author of the following Poems was of the School of Spenser and Milton, rather than Pope.” In the case of the Warton brothers, the return to older poetic forms was an active elision of Pope and the perceived ‘refinement’ he had brought to poetry. Fairer and Griffin have shown that Pope was a problematic poet for the Warton brothers, disrupting the native poetic tradition they sought to establish. Both poets were drawn to and identified with Pope, yet purposefully repressed his influence, constructing Pope as a poet of solely of reason, witty rhyme, and the polished couplet, while other aspects they were drawn to, such as the Gothic melancholy of ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, were suppressed, enabling them to claim the ‘true line of poetry’ themselves. The Wartons’ influential construction of Pope

?2 In his edition of Milton poems, Warton writes that his ‘Italian Sonnets have a remarkable air of gravity and dignity [...] free from the metaphysics of Petrarch’ (Poems Upon Several Occasions: English, Italian, and Latin, with Translations, by John Milton [London: J. Dodsley, 1785], p. 338). In his History of English Poetry, Warton dedicates most attention to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose ‘sentiments are for the most part natural and unaffected; arising from his own feelings’, unlike Petrarch, whose mind was ‘too much overlaid by learning’ (Zhe History of English Poetry, From the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols. [London: J. Dodsley, etc., 1774-1781], III: p. 12). The sonnets of Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney are only mentioned, yet Warton goes into detail on other sonnet writers, such as Henry Constable and Richard Barnfield, upon which the volume ends. Warton also briefly discusses the sonnet in the continuation of his History (c. 1782), unpublished in his lifetime (A History of English Poetry: An Unpublished Continuation, ed. Rodney M. Bain [Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1953]).

3 Joseph Warton, advertisement to The Poems on Various Subjects, of Thomas Warton, B. D. Late Fellow Of Trinity College (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791), sig. A2. See also Joseph Warton’s An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 4th edn., 2 vols. (London: J. Dodsley, 1782).

has shaped subsequent conceptions of ‘Romanticism’ and eighteenth-century literary history, not least the model propounded by M. H. Abrams, which has contributed to the obscuration of the way in which the revival of the sonnet was more gradual and complex.”

As well as looking to the past, Warton’s sonnets also looked forward, and had a significant, tangible influence. At Oxford a group of younger poets formed around Warton, the main output of which was sonnets. Robert Southey names John Bampfylde (1754-1797), Thomas Russell (1761-1788), William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), and Henry Headley (1765-1788) as the main members of Warton’s school, to which Fairer adds Thomas Park (1758/9-1834), Henry Kett (1761-1825), and George Richards (1767-1837) — although they were writing slightly later — and, beyond this ‘immediate group’, Edward Gardner (?1752—1823) and Smith herself, who are both identified as having a Wartonian accent (Organising Poetry, pp. 100-1). I suggest that Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823), Robert Holmes (bap. 1748, d. 1805), Edward Hamley (bap. 1764, d. 1834), and Thomas Warwick (?) could also be included.” With the exception of Richards, all these poets published sonnets. As well as writing from or having connections with Oxford, some poets had also been educated at Winchester College under Joseph Warton, who became headmaster there in 1766. While we do not know if Smith was familiar with them, Bampfylde’s widely read — including by Southey and Coleridge — Sixteen Sonnets (1778), published the year after Warton’s Poems, was the first publication of the century to be devoted entirely to sonnets.” Bampfylde briefly

4 See Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope.

25 Robert Southey, ‘ART. IL].-The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper; including the Series edited, with Prefaces Biographical and Critical, by Dr. Samuel Johnson; and the most approved Translations’, The Quarterly Review, 12 (1814), pp. 60-90. Robert Holmes studied at Winchester College and New College, Oxford and published Alfred. An Ode. With Six Sonnets in 1778. The sonnets celebrate the natural world and rural life; all are Italian in form and bear some resemblance to Bampfylde’s sonnets. Oxford poets Edmund Cartwright and Thomas Warwick both published sonnets in 1783. Cartwright’s Sonnets to Eminent Men. And an Ode to the Earl of Effingham (1783) contains six sonnets, one of which is written ‘To Mr. Warton’ and celebrates his excursions into the past. The sonnets of Warwick appear in his Abelard to Eloisa. An Epistle. To which are prefixed, Sonnets. With a Rhapsody Written at Stratford-Upon-Avon (1783). The sonnets, all Italian or nearly so, largely arise from visiting specific places and landscapes, informed by a Wartonion sense of Oxford, place, and the past. Edward Hamley matriculated from New College, Oxford in 1783 and published Sonnets in 1789, which contain Wartonian references and themes.

2 In 1776, an anonymous volume of twelve Sonnets appeared yet while it is the first publication of the century to be devoted entirely to sonnets through its title, it does also contain three other poems. All twelve sonnets take the Italian structure and while they appear to be parodies of sorts, and were reviewed badly, they take subjects which would soon be very popular, such as nightingales and rivers.

attended Winchester College in 1770 and although he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge he spent time at Oxford.” His sonnets are similar to Warton’s in their emphasis, describing landscapes — of the Teign valley in the Devon countryside — and looking to the past, taking the Italian form to do so. Sonnet X is addressed “To Mr Warton, on reading his History of English Poetry’, and celebrates how his ‘skill’ ‘Forbids in cold Oblivion’s arms to lie, | Dear long-lost masters of the British Song’.** Sonnet V ‘On the Evening’ is typical in the rural scene and interest in ‘times of old’ it presents:

[Whilst the watch-dog barks, and ploughmen lie Lull’d by the rocking winds, let me unfold

Whate’er in rhapsody, or strain most holy

The hoary Minstrel sang in times of old[.] (lines 8—11)

Shortly after the publication of Sixteen Sonnets, forced to move to London, Bampfylde suffered a breakdown, was briefly imprisoned at Newgate and was then confined to a private madhouse, bringing his poetic career to a poignant end at the age of twenty-four and limiting his influence.

Between the publications of Edwards and Warton, Thomas Gray’s sole sonnet ‘on the Death of Mr. Richard West’ was posthumously published, first in a minor edition of 1773, in which it was presented as an ‘epitaph’, and then in the more substantive The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings, edited by William Mason (1775). The sonnet was widely read and hugely influential, yet this is somewhat at odds with the spirit of the sonnet itself, which is characterised by a hidden, repressed, unheard aspect. It is dated August 1742 in Gray’s commonplace book, and he showed an embarrassment or dislike for it: “I will not send you the Sonnet’, he wrote to a friend, ‘but here is something else full as bad’.’ West, before his death, had been the only audience for Gray’s poems and translations and as such Gray’s sonnet is in part about this loss or lack of audience — ‘I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear’ — and correspondent — “These ears, alas! for other

7 Friend and fellow Wykehamist George Huddesford (1749-1809) provided the occasion recorded in Bampfylde’s sonnet ‘On Having Dined at Trinity College, Oxford’, where he was a student. In 1804 Huddesford published The Wiccamical Chaplet, a Selection of Original Poetry, a collection of verses by former pupils of Winchester College, including sonnets by Bampfylde, Bowles, and Russell, and two sonnets by Huddesford himself.

28 John Bampfylde, ‘Sonnet X. To Mr. Warton, on reading his History of English Poetry’, Sixteen Sonnets (London: J. Millidge, 1778), lines 10-11.

2 The earlier appearance of the sonnet is in Poems by Mr. Gray (Edinburgh: J. Balfour and W. Creech, 1773).

3° Thomas Gray, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), II: p. 560.

notes repine’. The sonnet is coloured by a futility and invalidity of sorts, which its unpublished state befits. The sonnet begins and ends with ‘in vain’, and mourns the one person who could have sympathised with the speaker’s grief:

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire: The birds in vain their amorous descant join, Or cheerful fields resume their green attire: These ears, alas! for other notes repine,

A different object do these eyes require.

My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.

Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, And new-born pleasure brings to happier men: The fields to all their wonted tribute bear; To warm their little loves the birds complain.

I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, And weep the more because I weep in vain.*!

The sense of enclosure is enhanced by the repetitions between the octave and sestet: ‘smiling mornings’ becomes ‘morning smiles’, and the birds and fields similarly reappear, while the rhyme scheme — ababababcdcded — contributes to the effect, especially as the rhymes in the sestet echo those of the octave. Setting is important in Gray’s sonnet, although it is an unspecified and generic one and does not carry the same significance as in, for example, his ‘Ode on Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (1747) and ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751). While Gray draws upon place for meaning, there is mismatch between speaker and environment and it is unable to afford that for which they ‘repine’ and ‘require’.