ABSTRACT
Historically, Charlotte Smith and Felicia Hemans stand at the crossroads between two generations of Romantic poets. This chapter focuses on the treatment of grief in the poetry of Smith and Hemans points to important affinities rather than historical, cultural, and formal differences between these two female Romantic poets. Rachel Crawford reads Smith's and Hemans's re-visioning of gender relations in their depiction of poetic bowers aligning them both with 'the lineage of male poets' and 'an artistic tradition in which loss is a central anecdote of creative power'. Recollecting Hemans's evening seascape poems, Smith circumscribes an enchanted circle in which the visible and invisible, the living and the dead, the restored and the irrecoverable, the real and the unreal commune with one another. Similar to Smith's image of the book of nature as a 'Heaven-indited volume', at the close of 'Saint Monica', Hemans invests artistic and cultural achievements with transcendental qualities through an elision of the division between culture and nature.
