The English Sappho 125countrywomen; who, unpatronized by courts, and unprotected by
the powerful, persevere in the paths of literature, and ennoble them-
selves by the un- perishable lustre of MENTAL PR E- EMINENCE!” (386).
This is the essential message of Robinson’s formal choice and why
she wanted to make it so forcefully—to show that she can stand on
an equal footing with male poets. But, in typical fashion, Robinson
neglects to identify any of these “illustrious countrywomen.” Despite
her indictment in the preface of the literary sexism of her own coun-
try and age, she is unwilling to share the Petrarchan laurel with
Charlotte Smith or Anna Seward, who, in 1796, were the only serious
competitors for it and who also happened to be women. She writes
that “the liberal education of the Greeks was such, as inspired them
with an unprejudiced enthusiasm for works of genius: and that when
they paid adoration to Sappho, they idolized the MUSE, and not the
WOMAN” (389). The Greeks, she believed, were enlightened enough
to see beyond gender stereotypes and appreciate literature by women
on an equal plane with that written by men; this was the appreciation
she wanted for herself, but she was not willing to extend it to her fel-
low female poets.
Robinson published Sappho and Phaon under her own name
because this project required singularity in order to fulfill its pursuit of
poetic legitimacy. Sappho and Phaon is, after, all about the pre- eminent
woman poet while it inf lects the form associated with the pre- eminent
man poet. The goal is to unite her own name with those of Sappho
and Petrarch. She employs Petrarchan form in the name of the arche-
typal female poet as a means of subverting the tradition, in which the
male poet sublimates his sexual desire for an unattainable female object
of desire as poetic immortality; and, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning
would later do, Robinson chooses to do so in a sequence of forty- four
perfectly legitimate sonnets to show, in the most gendered sense pos-
sible, how she has mastered that tradition. Sexual politics aside, if there
is a poetics of sonnet writing, Robinson and Seward have articulated it
as well as anyone. The sonnet, more so than any form other than the
epic, its formal inverse, is always an allusion to every other poem of its
kind ever written. The sonnets of the English Renaissance, for instance,
particularly those of Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, and Shakespeare—even
the Holy Sonnets of Donne—are always about Petrarch, his Laura, and
his laurel, regardless of whatever else they have to say. After Petrarch,
sonneteers tend to approach the form with an eye toward immortal-
ity: As Shakespeare writes, at the end of his famous and “illegitimate”
“Sonnet 18,” (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) —conclud-
ing epigrammatically—“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, /9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1259780230100251_05_ch03.indd 125 12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM
10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel RobinsonCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket iTr
omso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-13