The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

The English Sappho 151

West Wind” as a homostrophic ode consisting of five terza rima

sonnets—and thus a nonce form—carries a wealth of significance

in its formal allusions to Horace, Dante, and Petrarch. Robinson’s

poetry works in similar ways. She understood that her practice in

Sappho and Phaon was greatly informed by the simple love lyric asso-

ciated with Sappho and endlessly replicated in newspaper columns;

by the heroic epistle innovated by Ovid and revived by Pope in Eloisa

to Abelard; and by the sonnet devised by Petrarch, sanctified by

Milton, and popularized by Charlotte Smith’s “illegitimate” varia-

tions. She understood, moreover, that Pope’s heroic epistle was imi-

tated ad nauseam throughout the eighteenth century. Her “Petrarch

to Laura” probably was inspired by a popular anonymous volume

of modern takes on the Ovidian form that included similarly cross-

dressed epistles—Abelard to Eloisa, Leonora to Tasso, Ovid to Julia,

Spring, and Other Poems (1788). This book, moreover, was dedicated

to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Robinson’s occasional patron.

But Robinson’s use of the heroic epistle for “Petrarch to Laura” and

her adaptation of Pope’s translation of Ovid for her sonnet sequence

Sappho and Phaon is also informed by the fact that the Perdita scan-

dal had been poetically reified in a burlesque of the Heroides called

Poetical Epistle from Florizel to Perdita: with Perdita’s Answer (1785),

which imitates the epistles exchanged between Paris and Helen in

Ovid’s collection. She appropriated the form for her own purposes.

So, even when Robinson’s imagery or diction appears faulty or defi-

cient, the form of any given poem is likely hugely significant. Sappho

and Phaon is the best example of this and is her definitive accomplish-

ment in the sonnet. She wrote only a handful of sonnets after this

sequence, including a political sonnet signed “T. B.” (Tabitha Bramble)

(1: 361) and a “Burlesque Sonnet” parodying Della Crusca, who

appears as Mr. Doleful (who is not “merry”) in her novel Walsingham

(5: 203). These engage traditions other than the strictly Petrarchan

one. In the final year of her life, while working for Daniel Stuart at

the Morning Post, Robinson returned to the regular composition of

lyric poems because she was obligated to provide at least two poems a

week; as chief poetry correspondent, she drew upon her facility with

lyric forms, which Stuart could easily accommodate in the columns

of the newspaper. Several of these are light lyrics and Anacreontics

on disappointed love that Robinson signed “Sappho.” One of these,

“Sappho, to Phaon,” revisits the subject of her sonnet sequence but in

tetrameters reminiscent of Della Crusca’s poetry (2: 56–7). Although

many of these later Sappho poems, such as “Sappho—To Night” (2:

50–1), “A Lover’s Vow” (68–9), “A Cure for Love” (80–1), “Sappho,

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1519780230100251_05_ch03.indd 151 12/28/2010 11:08:43 AM12/28/2010 11:08:43 AM

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

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