Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, credited to Charlotte Turner Smith, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, by Charlotte Turner Smith. Read by David Barnes and Cori Samuel. Charlotte Turner Smith (1749 – 1806) was an English poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility. It was in 1784, in debtor's prison with her husband Benjamin, that she wrote and published her first work, Elegiac Sonnets. The work achieved instant success, allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison. Smith's sonnets helped initiate a revival of the form and granted an aura of respectability to her later novels. Stuart Curran, the editor of Smith's poems, has written that Smith is "the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic". She helped shape the "patterns of thought and conventions of style" for the period. Romantic poet William Wordsworth was the most affected by her works. He said of Smith in the 1830s that she was "a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered". By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Smith was largely forgotten. (Summary by David Barnes)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems
• Author credits: Charlotte Turner Smith
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 107
• Listed recording duration: 3:04:49

Catalogue topics

• poetry
• sonnets
• Charlotte
• love
• longing

Opening tracks: first 24 of 107

1. 001 - Sonnet I — 1:16
2. 002 - Sonnet II. Written at the close of Spring — 1:11
3. 003 - Sonnet III. To a Nightingale — 1:19
4. 004 - Sonnet IV. To the Moon — 1:14
5. 005 - Sonnet V. To the South Downs — 1:19
6. 006 - Sonnet VI. To Hope — 1:16
7. 007 - Sonnet VII. On the Departure of the Nightingale — 1:19
8. 008 - Sonnet VIII. To Spring — 1:07
9. 009 - Sonnet IX — 1:13
10. 010 - Sonnet X. To Mrs. G. — 1:10
11. 011 - Sonnet XI. To Sleep — 1:20
12. 012 - Sonnet XII. Written on the Sea Shore — 1:17
13. 013 - Sonnet XIII. From Petrarch — 1:06
14. 014 - Sonnet XIV. From Petrarch — 1:13
15. 015 - Sonnet XV. From Petrarch — 1:18
16. 016 - Sonnet XVI. From Petrarch — 1:12
17. 017 - Sonnet XVII. From the Thirteenth Cantata of Metastasio — 1:21
18. 018 - Sonnet XVIII. To the Earl of Egremont — 1:10
19. 019 - Sonnet XIX. To Mr Hayley — 1:22
20. 020 - Sonnet XX. To the Countess of A---- — 1:18
21. 021 - Sonnet XXI. Supposed to be Written by Werter — 1:17
22. 022 - Sonnet XXII. Supposed to be Written by Werter — 1:17
23. 023 - Sonnet XXIII. Supposed to be Written by Werter. To the North Star — 1:24
24. 024 - Sonnet XXIV. Supposed to be Written by Werter — 1:22

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.