{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02351313969571231, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.084033613445378, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The hybrid poems of Smith and Wordsworth: questions and disputes

This essay argues that in titling their debut collections with the hybrid forms of the “elegiac sonnet” and the “lyrical ballad,” Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth (the majority author of the volume he shared with S. T. Coleridge) participate in the late‐eighteenth‐century debate on what makes poetry. Through their collections they engage in conversation with theorists like Hugh Blair and John Newbery, and they use their poetry to advance a new idea: that by merging forms poetry itself evolves. Romantic diversity thus develops from their poetic responses to the efforts of Blair and Newbery to establish fixed and rigid boundaries to poetic form.