The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

128 The Poetry of Mary Robinson form to place the prevailing figure of poetic masculinity in the female epistolary position. To ...

The English Sappho 129 of priestly celibacy unnatural: Petrarch took minor orders that did not require celibacy but, like Abelar ...

130 The Poetry of Mary Robinson established, affords the reclamation of the lovers’ physical intimacy through the love letter; s ...

The English Sappho 131 Eloisa exclaims, in the famous line, “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!” (207). In this context, E ...

132 The Poetry of Mary Robinson the sonnet. Similarly, she opts for the sonnet when she takes on the voice of the female poet Sa ...

The English Sappho 133 Sappho’s, as well as a contrast between the sexualization of their respective literary reputations. Sapph ...

134 The Poetry of Mary Robinson her store, / Love’s radiant scenes are changed to scenes of Care” (5, 9–10). The poem concludes ...

The English Sappho 135 sexual passion—“the treach’rous spells of low desire” and its “vulgar joys,” which “wound” and “debase” “ ...

136 The Poetry of Mary Robinson Pope, and Petrarch—who interpolates commentary as well, Robinson adheres to a fictional frame wh ...

The English Sappho 137 uses Pope’s translation as her epigraph for the entire sequence, “Love taught my tears in sadder notes to ...

138 The Poetry of Mary Robinson poem at this point might appear to be ambivalent, but the comparison suggests that the Bower of ...

The English Sappho 139 Petrarchan subjectivity conditioned by literature of Sensibility. Like Gertrude, the heroine of her novel ...

140 The Poetry of Mary Robinson For example, Sonnet VI, presumably in Sappho’s voice, asks if love really is nothing more than s ...

The English Sappho 141 Robinson would have found a fair share of supposedly deviant sexual- ity in Pope’s translation. In other ...

142 The Poetry of Mary Robinson Return, fair youth, return, and bring along Joy to my soul, and vigour to my song: Absent from t ...

The English Sappho 143 Sappho seeks to remind Phaon of their erotic past. The Ovidian Sappho, however, uses the memory to seduce ...

144 The Poetry of Mary Robinson IX; 332; 13–4). Sappho’s sexual obsession thus threatens not only to drive Phaon away, but also ...

The English Sappho 145 That melting ev’ry thought to fond desire, Bade sweet delirium o’er thy senses roll? (XXV; 337; 1–4) Agai ...

146 The Poetry of Mary Robinson of appropriate English eroticism—as opposed to that of the Greeks— Addison blatantly encourages ...

The English Sappho 147 which is a formal triangulation itself. Just as the male Phaon is the conduit for the feeling expressed, ...