ABSTRACT
This essay questions the period-bound nature of the dramatic monologue to suggest that the egoistic personae developed by William Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith function as its Romantic version. 1 Moreover, it questions the gendered binaries developed by critics proposing that male writers concern themselves with the Self while female writers pursue a feminine ethic of care for the Other. Instead, I will argue that both Smith and Wordsworth concentrate on establishing the parameters of the Poet, filtered through an exploration of the artfully-constructed Self. Looking in particular at Elegiac Sonnets and Lyrical Ballads, I will investigate how the “theatrical,” to use Judith Pascoe’s term, underpins and indeed creates the personalized narrators of the poems. 2 Instead of seeing the poems as thinly-disguised autobiographies, I read their presentations of sincerity and authenticity as dramatized, and the position of Poet as itself a role, a function made possibly by Smith’s and Wordsworth’s abilities to write Selves that are simultaneously Self and Other. The egotistical sublime, then, instead of functioning as an unconscious revelation of solipsism, becomes a tool by which the poets can act out fantasies of unified subjectivity. For the late eighteenth century, fascinated with an emerging culture of celebrity and individuality, Smith’s and Wordsworth’s poetry helped to form an expectation that the poetical was personal. It also undermined such expectations and created a space within poetry that critiqued these narrow parameters. For Smith and Wordsworth, the investigation of what constitutes a 18Poet is less gender-inflected than their explorations of themselves as poets. Each seems to critique a kind of ur-Poet, a Romantic construct characterized by the very ego that Keats associated with Wordsworth himself.
