Observation, Sympathy, and Education in Charlotte Smith's Conversations Introducing Poetry

In this essay, I argue that Smith's final children's book, Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804), privileges observation as the central and most responsible way to interact with the natural world, a choice that is both aesthetic and political. Conversations Introducing Poetry consists of a series of dialogues between a mother and her children, interspersed with their poetic observations of animals and plants. Smith borrows techniques that she deployed in her lyric poetry in order to depict observation as an act of sympathetic engagement with nonhuman animals. She thereby instructs child-readers how to act as sympathetic and engaged members of a world that includes nature as much as domestic and political spaces.