8 The Poetry of Mary RobinsonColeridge considered her to be a good poet. Her poems to him were
among her final compositions, and one of them, “Mrs. Robinson to
the Poet Coleridge,” confirms that he shared with her his master-
piece, “Kubla Khan,” 16 years before he published it. Coleridge also
wrote several admiring poems to her. As we shall see, Robinson’s lit-
era r y ca reer f rom sta r t to f i n ish is d ist i ng u ished by t h is k i nd of poet ic
and quasi- erotic exchange.^ And the exchange between Robinson and
Coleridge mirrors that between Robert Merry, writing as “Della
Crusca,” and Hannah Cowley, writing as “Anna Matilda.” Indeed,
Robinson’s poetic career was established and conditioned by her own
association with Merry and with his nom de plume. Robinson’s affili-
ations with male poets, chief among them Merry and Coleridge, is
crucial to understanding her conception of her own poetry in terms
of form and fame. Rather than presume that Coleridge “uncritically
but chivalrously overestimated ‘Perdita’s’ work,” as Earl Leslie Griggs
long ago suggested (91), I want to investigate just what it is about her
poetr y itself that pleased him, and to consider the possibility that the
erotic and the poetic are not mutually exclusive interests that result
invariably in an overheated overestimate. I am not suspending the
erotic element; rather, I am casting it in a different light, one that
is formally illuminating. We miss an integral feature of Robinson’s
poet r y if we read Coleridge’s specif ic rema rks on Robinson’s met rica l
facility as merely the result of erotic confusion. While her poetry is
hardly f lawless, Robinson’s lyrical ebullience is measured—literally
metered—by a technical rigor that displays formal affinities with not
only the lyric poets of the second half of the eighteenth century who
likely influenced her, but also with those later poets who employ
innovative lyrical forms—poets such as Southey, Wordsworth, Scott,
Byron, Tennyson, and Poe. While I am not willing to go so far as
Stuart Curran does in asserting that “she changed the very nature
of the craft of poetry” (“Mary Robinson” 9), I do see Robinson
as a significant transitional figure in the history of English poetic
form. My purpose here is not to make grand claims for Robinson’s
importance but, rather, to show how she works to earn it. Poetic
forms and poetic pseudonyms function as ways of representing her
claim to poetic fame. In much of what follows, therefore, I am fol-
lowing Curran’s lead: he urges Robinson’s readers “to revert to the
centrality of poetic technique and to the essential critical justice of
Coleridge’s observation” (“Mary Robinson” 16). Poetic form is a
kind of networking for Robinson by which she participates in a web
of social interaction and literary intertextuality in order to achieve
professional legitimacy, recognition, and fame.^109780230100251_02_int.indd 89780230100251_02_int.indd 8 12/28/2010 11:08:08 AM12/28/2010 11:08:08 AM
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