The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

The English Sappho 123

sometimes a bright gem sheds lustre on the page of poesy, it scarcely

excites attention, owing to the disrepute in which sonnets are fallen.

(1: 321)

Robinson hearkens back to Samuel Johnson’s definition of the son-

net as having a “particular rule” and his qualification that the form

“has not been used by any man of eminence since Milton.” Here,

she cites in a footnote Smith’s opinion that the legitimate sonnet is

“ill calculated for our language” but, without comment of her own,

pairs it with William Kendall’s assertion that legitimate sonnets

“assert their superiority over those tasteless and inartificial produc-

tions, which assume the name”; that is, illegitimate sonnets, such as

those by Smith. As the most successful contemporary composer of

sonnets, Smith was Robinson’s chief competitor for the Petrarchan

laurel. Robinson, without explicitly condemning Smith, exploits the

weakness she perceives in Smith’s claim to poetic legitimacy, thereby

implicitly asserting her own prowess in order to take the prize away

from a fellow female poet. With such a move, Robinson, like the other

women writers in her Monthly Magazine essay, is also “ardent in the

pursuit of fame”; she, however, displays none of the solidarity she calls

for there. Her strategy is to assert the extreme difficulty of the legiti-

mate sonnet and her own intrepidity in following “that path, which,

even the best poets have thought it dangerous to tread” (1: 322);

she intervenes in a specifically masculinist tradition by appropriating

the mantle of legitimacy. Robinson believed sonnet writing to be a

rigorous test of poetic skill, so the rules must be enforced in order

to pass the test legitimately. She observes that “sonnets are so com-

mon, for every rhapsody of rhyme, from six lines to sixty comes under

that denomination, that the eye frequently turns from this species of

poem with disgust,” adding that “every school- boy, every romantic

scribbler, thinks a sonnet a task of little diff iculty.” This is the reason,

according to Robinson, that magazines and newspapers abound with

“the non- descript ephemera from the heated brains of self- important

poetasters, all ushered into notice under the appellation of SONNET!”

(1: 322). She thus intends for her preface to distinguish her latest and

most ambitious literary work from ephemeral popular culture, such as

much of her own previous work.

Robinson understood that she had to demonstrate mastery of a dif-

ficult form in an ambitious project in order to achieve the Petrarchan

“wreath of fame”; like Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

after her, Robinson chose the legitimate sonnet. This mastery is what

A n na Sewa rd ca l ls “t he Son net’s cla im.” I n opposit ion to Sm it h, bot h

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1239780230100251_05_ch03.indd 123 12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM

10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel Robinson

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