Wikipedia:Peer review/Beachy Head (poem)/archive1

Beachy Head (poem)

I'm interested in making this article my first FA. Since this is new territory for me, I'd appreciate any feedback or guidance on what this article might need before then!

Thank you! ~ L 🌸 (talk) 00:13, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

UC

Great work on the article. A few points with an eye on FAC:

• Make sure you check the pedantic stuff in the MoS: a few examples:
  • The article subject has WP:TIES to Great Britain, so British English should be used. In British English, punctuation goes outside of quotation marks unless it is part of the quotation: so the comma at the end of e.g. "not completed according to the original design," should be moved to the other side of the quotes. Likewise, watch out for e.g. fossilized ("fossilised" in BrE).
  • MOS:DASH: it's the Keats–Shelley Journal, not the Keats-Shelley Journal.
  • MOS:HYPHEN, particularly the principle that compound adjectives (like "blank verse") should generally be hyphenated when used in apposition (so "the poem is written in blank verse" but "it is a blank-verse poem").
  • MOS:": a wandering poetic 'stranger': in nearly all cases, double quotes are preferred.
  • MOS:GEOCOMMA a house in Hampshire, England, where Smith lived.
  • When used for an actual or metaphorical goddess, "Muse" is capitalised.

• Remember that you are writing for an intelligent but uninformed reader. There are a few places where something is stated as if the reader should already know it: these ideas should always be introduced first. For example:
  • nonetheless, Smith continued to support French revolutionary ideals: we haven't previously said that Smith did support French revolutionary ideals (or what those were).
  • the opposition between the sublime and the beautiful (or picturesque), which was often a gendered binary: gendered how?
  • Her novels had stopped selling well: we never actually said, in the body text, that her novels did sell well, or that she was a novelist at all.

• Make sure that images have good alt text, per MOS:ACCESSIBILITY, and full licensing information (File:Romney-Charlotte-Smith.jpg and File:Portrait of Erasmus Darwin by Joseph Wright of Derby (1792).jpg, for instance, are missing their US PD tags, while the CC licence on File:De slag bij Beachy Head, 1690, RP-P-OB-82.713.jpg cannot be correct for a work of 1690, and File:The natural history of British birds, or, A selection of the most rare, beautiful and interesting birds which inhabit this country - the descriptions from the Systema naturae of Linnaeus - with (14563128448) (cropped).jpg is clearly PD but needs to be shown to be such.).

• The "Adaptations" section goes into a lot of detail on a single adaptation, which is surprising given that we only have one source. Remember that this is an article about the poem, not the adaptation itself: is this WP:DUEWEIGHT in proportion to how much coverage that adaptation receives in other high-quality treatments of the poem?

• Most of the citations don't have page numbers: these are generally expected, where they exist. Where they don't (for example, in an ebook), you can use e.g. search "Beachy Head" as the |at= parameter.

• Footnotes need citations too: what's the source for the idea of "green language" being an invention of Williams?

• The bibliography should only be sources that are cited: Ruwe 2003 doesn't seem to be used.

I hope these are helpful. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:24, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, this is all extremely helpful, and points me to details that I hadn’t been checking! I especially appreciate the examples of things that need more explaining. (Part of me finds it shocking and hilarious to imagine that the gendered binary of beautiful/sublime could possibly have the beautiful be masculine and the sublime be feminine, but of course an obscure 18thC aesthetic theory won’t feel obvious to most readers, especially since by “beautiful” they mean things like “three cows standing near each other”.) I will start working away at these areas of improvement! ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:10, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Comments from Tim riley

General comment:

• "Smith" appears 133 times in the text, and it would improve the flow of the prose if you were to chuck in a pronoun wherever possible, for instance in the para beginning "Smith has been called a "French Revolution poet..." And later, " Smith's depiction ... Smith ennobles ... Smith juxtaposes ... Smith criticizes" and so on. A few "she"s or "her"s would make for smoother reading.

Individual points:

• "As the poem was being composed, England was engaged in the Napoleonic Wars with France" – but Scotland, Ireland and Wales weren't?
• "which was often a gendered binary" – a what? An explanation or a blue link, please.
• "The poem was well-received on its first publication – not hyphenated when used attributively like this.
• "1803 the year that England and France ended their one year of peace" – again confusing England with the UK. ("Britain" would pass muster, I think, but not just "England")
• "her publisher Joseph Johnson in May 1806" – did she have several publishers? This is fine if so, but if JJ was her sole publisher commas are needed fore and aft.
• "with John Keats' two fragmented epics as the last" – any reason for the hurtful AmE ess-apostrope rather than the normal English ess-apostrophe-ess? This is from the current (2015) edition of Fowler: Names ending in -s: Use 's for the possessive case in names and surnames whenever possible; in other words, whenever you would tend to pronounce the possessive form of the name with an extra iz sound, e.g. Charles's brother, St James's Square, Thomas's niece, Zacharias's car.
• "but in general Smith's notes are remarkably accurate" – says who?
• "the narrating style is arguably similar to that which is used in the footnotes" – argued by whom?
• "The opening apostrophe to the cliffs of Beachy Head is similar to the poetic invocation of a muse common in epic poetry" – another assertion in need of a source.
• "England and France were at war from 1792 to 1802 – see above for England/Britain/UK.
• "Unlike other Romantics, however" – there are six "however"s in this article which is probably six too many. The word is usually woolly padding, adding nothing to the sense and gumming up the prose. I suggest rereading your text and expurgating any "however" you can dispense with without changing the meaning of the sentence.
• "abandoning rural labor in favour of smuggling" – right to use the American spelling in the quotations, just below, if they are in Amerenglish, but in the main text the spelling should be English.
• "Among the Romantic poets, William Wordsworth is most often discussed closely with Smith" – that really isn't true is it? Among the Romantic poets WW is most often discussed alongside the other male Romantic poets. I think the best you could truthfully say here is that among the Romantics the poet with whom Smith is most often closely discussed is William Wordsworth.

I hope these few points are helpful. Tim riley talk 20:43, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to examine this article. I will work my way through polishing up these inconsistencies. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:29, 10 December 2024 (UTC)