The English Sappho 127Petrarch, Robinson negotiates with such authors as Longinus, Ovid,
Spenser, Edmund Waller, Milton, Ambrose Philips, Joseph Addison,
Collins, Cowper, William Kendall, Jean- Jacques Barthélemy, and
Pope—an illustrious list of men, most of whom she cites in her preface.
Again, the book only glances obliquely at Charlotte Smith’s “illegiti-
mate” sonnet practices. In addition to her claim to poetic legitimacy
through the Petrarchan sonnet, Robinson was careful to demonstrate
that her account of Sappho was learned. Robinson derived most of her
prefatory remarks on Sappho from Addison’s three Spectator papers on
Sappho (1711) and William Beaumont’s 1790 English translation of
Barthélemy’s Le Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1788). Robinson
also may have consulted the work of Francis Fawkes, whose “Life of
Sappho” and translations were republished in 1795, around the time
Robinson began working on her sequence, in A Complete Edition of
the Poets of Great Britain.^14 Despite her occasional Latin citations,
Robinson’s primary source for the narrative, key phrases, and atten-
dant imagery of Sappho and Phaon is Pope’s translation of the Latin
“Sapho to Phaon,” which was discovered in the fifteenth century and
presumed to be one of Ovid’s Heroides. Although some scholars today
dispute Ovid’s authorship, neither Pope nor Robinson doubted its
authenticity. While engaging the Petrarchan sonnet and that tradition,
Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon also involves the Ovidian heroic epistle
and its formal associations, if not strictly its formal properties.
To ventriloquize Sappho, Robinson invokes not only these two
masculine traditions but also the ways they voice male and female sex-
ual desire, thereby placing them in dialogue.^15 The Petrarchan sonnet
traditionally expresses the male poet’s desire for an objectified woman,
while the Ovidian heroic epistle traditionally expresses a female char-
acter’s desire for an absent male lover. In addition to using Pope’s
“Sapho to Phaon” for her series of Petrarchan sonnets, Robinson
had also previously associated Petrarch with the Ovidian tradition in
her 1791 volume, which first earned her the sobriquet “the English
Sappho.” In her long poem “Petrarch to Laura,” she writes from the
male poet’s perspective—an apparent reversal of poetic subjectivity
given the revelation of “Laura” and “Laura Maria” as avatars of the
poet Mary Robinson. “Petrarch to Laura” surprisingly is neither a
sonnet nor a sequence of sonnets but an imitation of Pope’s Eloisa to
Abelard, the work that probably had the most inf luence on Robinson’s
poetry.^16 Pope’s heroic epistle is his modernization of Ovid’s Heroides,
in which Ovid ventriloquizes famous women from Greek and Roman
history. Pope makes the medieval Eloisa his heroine, while Robinson
makes the medieval Petrarch hers, using the conventions of Ovid’s9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1279780230100251_05_ch03.indd 127 12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM
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