132 The Poetry of Mary Robinsonthe sonnet. Similarly, she opts for the sonnet when she takes on the
voice of the female poet Sappho.^17
The formal and gendered allusiveness of both the heroic epistle and
the legitimate sonnet gains even greater resonance when Robinson
chooses to perform Sappho’s passion for Phaon via Petrarch’s tradition.
In “Petrarch to Laura,” Robinson’s formal choice suggests that she
intends a representation of Petrarch as a feminized figure of Sensibility,
along with Pope’s Eloisa and Goethe’s Werter. In her heroic epistle,
Robinson is not interested in performing a Petrarch capable of mas-
tering his passion, which is what the Canzoniere is mostly invested in
demonstrating, particularly in the sonnets that take place after Laura’s
death. Like Eloisa and Werter, this fictional Petrarch looks forward
to death as the end of his excessive sensibility. If her Petrarch is a
variation of Pope’s Eloisa, he is also a figuration of the eighteenth-
century Sappho, whose desperate passion and legendary suicide echoes
Werterism. Robinson’s portrayal of Petrarch in the heroic epistle asso-
ciates the male poet with the same kind of dangerous sensibility that
Robinson recognized in eighteenth- century portrayals of Sappho—
most significantly in the Ovidian poem translated by Pope that served
as Pope’s prototype for his own Eloisa to Abelard. In her preface to
Sappho and Phaon, Robinson paraphrases Addison’s complaint that
what remains of Sappho’s poetry is, in her words, “replete with such
fascinating beauties, and adorned with such a vivid glow of sensibility,
that, probably had they been preserved entire, it would have been dan-
gerous to have perused them” (1: 326). Addison was tactfully allud-
ing to Sappho’s supposed sexual liaisons with other women and thus
was grateful that more poetry depicting such passion did not survive.
Robinson elides the issue entirely, however, attributing the danger, not
to lasciviousness, but to the powerful authenticity of Sappho’s emo-
tion. Her poems, Robinson writes, “possessed none of the artificial
decorations of a feigned passion; they were the genuine effusions of a
supremely enlightened soul, laboring to subdue a fatal enchantment”
(1: 326). She acknowledges that Sappho’s poems are “too glowing for
the fastidious refinement of modern times,” referring to the language
of erotic desire that, she points out, the ancient Greeks could appreci-
ate regardless of the poet’s sex. But given the authenticity Robinson
ascr ibes to Sappho’s emot ions, t he i rony of Sappho and Phaon is that the
sequence is itself artificial, carefully constructed in—as Sappho’s feel-
ings are mediated through—Petrarchan form. Robinson is able to keep
distance between her subject, Sappho, and her personal subjectivity.
By choosing Petrarch’s form as the vehicle for her Sappho’s pas-
sion, Robinson implies an affinity between Petrarch’s passions and9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1329780230100251_05_ch03.indd 132 12/28/2010 11:08:41 AM12/28/2010 11:08:41 AM
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