The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

The English Sappho 133

Sappho’s, as well as a contrast between the sexualization of their

respective literary reputations. Sappho is destroyed by her passion for

Phaon, a passion that ironically codifies the portrayal of Sappho as

monstrously oversexed, whereas Petrarch is sanctified by his passion

for Laura, a passion that ultimately transcends carnality and justifies

his fame. Just as she feminizes Petrarch through poetic form in her

earlier “Petrarch to Laura,” in Sappho and Phaon, she masculinizes

Sappho by strictly employing the legitimate or Petrarchan sonnet.

When she ventriloquizes Sappho, therefore, Robinson mediates that

poet’s voice through Petrarchan form but also, here again, through

the Ovidian Heroides and Pope’s language. So, Robinson’s Sappho

and Phaon employs Petrarch and Ovid in almost diametrically oppo-

site ways from her “Petrarch to Laura”: in the earlier poem, she uses

Ovidian intertextuality to feminize the masculine Petrarch; in the

later sequence, she uses Ovidian intertextuality to masculinize her

perspective on the feminine Sappho.

Robinson, thus, reanimates the archetypical poetess via her own

adoption of a masculine poetic form. Her interest in doing so is evident

in an earlier “Sonnet to Lesbia,” which appeared three years before

in the Oracle on 5 October 1793. Importantly, signed “Sappho,” this

is Robinson’s first published legitimate sonnet; that is, the first of her

sonnets to have a strictly Petrarchan octave. Not part of a sequence,

this sonnet stands by itself as an adaptation of Sappho’s famous ode

praised by Longinus, translated in the eighteenth century by Ambrose

Philips and beginning, in that translation, “Blest as th’ immortal

Gods is he.”^18 As we shall see, the blatant homoeroticism of Sappho’s

ode—the young man is “blest” because he gets to enjoy the erotic

propinquity of a young woman whom Sappho’s speaker also desires—

troubled eighteenth- century readers more than it did Longinus. In

“Sonnet to Lesbia,” the poet writes as Sappho but with a contrary

purpose, eliding the homoerotic and adapting Sappho’s opening

line to read “FALSE is the YOUTH, who dares by THEE recline” (1:

214; 1). Whereas the original Sappho addresses a woman for whom

she feels almost inexpressible desire, Robinson’s Sappho addresses a

Lesbian girl (“Lesbia,” a name which later becomes a pseudonym)

in order to warn her that this man, who turns out to be Phaon, also

has seduced the speaker in the same manner she here observes. This

single sonnet introduces one of the major themes of the sequence

Sappho and Phaon: the debilitating inf luence of heteroerotic pas-

sion on the creativity of the woman poet. Here, just as she urges,

“fear him, LESBIA—fear him,” she admits her own hypocrisy and the

futility of her poetic expression: “In vain for me the Muse unfolds

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