Chapter 4

Stuart’s Laureates I: Poets and

Politics Perplext

The tension between love and reason explored in Sappho and Phaon

had a l ready been d ra mat ized by R obi nson t he prev ious yea r a s a n a l le-

gorical dialogue in a poem that first appeared on 12 February 1795

in the Tory newspaper the Tr u e B r iton, edited by Robinson’s friend

John Taylor. In this earlier poem, Love boasts of his power to subvert

Reason’s “pedant rules,” and to delude and subjugate the emotions of

mere mortals. Love’s power is factitiously carnivalesque: he is able to

“make the wisest fools” and “to Idiots lend a gleam of wit” (4, 7); he

makes “Deformity appear / More beauteous than the day!” (9–10).

Reason admits of this truth but, just as capricious, retorts that Love

succeeds only “where I refuse my aid” (19). In the end, though,

Reason wins. While the poem is not explicitly political, in its context

within the pages of the Tr u e B r iton it reads as fundamentally conser-

vative. Its promotion of maturity and sober wisdom accords with the

paper’s stance against reform and revolution. In February of 1795,

just months after Pitt’s suspension of habeas corpus, the execution of

Robespierre and the triumph of anti- Revolutionary sentiment, and

the acquittals of Hardy, Tooke, and Thelwall for treason, Robinson’s

assertion of reason over delusive passionate enthusiasm is a particularly

safe position to maintain. On its own, the poem is obviously a precur-

sor to her later critiques of excessive sensibility, such as that made by

Sappho and Phaon as noted in the previous chapter. Robinson later

would reprint this poem in her novel The Natural Daughter as the

composition of her heroine, Martha Morley, who, Robinson writes,

is “not one of those romantic females who are led from the paths of

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

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