198 The Poetry of Mary RobinsonSouthey’s Curse of Kehama to be “a work of great talent, but not of
much genius”; he adds that Coleridgedrew the distinction between talent and genius by comparing the first
to a watch and the last to an eye: both were beautiful, but one was
only a piece of ingenious mechanism, while the other was a production
above all art. Talent was a manufacture; genius a gift, that no labour
nor study could supply: nobody could make an eye, but anybody, duly
instructed, could make a watch. (qtd. in Foakes 136)Could it be that, to Coleridge, Robinson was a better poet than
Southey? While I do not want to build too much on Collier’s report,
I do find it significant that Coleridge’s assessment of Robinson’s
genius, connected as it is to her metrical practice, points toward his
later appropriation of Schlegel’s theory of “organic” form that “shapes
as it developes from within” as opposed to “mechanic” form which is
“pre- determined” (Biographia 2: 84n). Toward the end of her career,
Robinson began inventing her own meters and forms, and the poems
Coleridge singles out for praise are poems in which she has eschewed
received forms in favor of her own. Her original meters then become,
in a sense, predetermined in that they provide a matrix for the poem;
but the poems succeed in Coleridge’s estimation because the form she
invents is particularly appropriate to the poem. And, despite all of the
acclaim Robinson received during the 1790s, it is Coleridge’s remarks
on the technicalities of her poetic skills that get at precisely what it is
that makes Robinson’s poetry unique. To put it simply, although her
biography and career are fascinating in many ways, her technical virtu-
osity is, as Coleridge recognized, her greatest strength as a poet. As his
letter to Southey suggests, Coleridge was interested in Robinson’s mind
and how it worked—it is “full and overf lowing,” he says. Coleridge
thus marvels at the way Robinson attempts to express and to contain
her abundant imagination within her “fascinating” meters.
Coleridge, a younger poet by some fourteen years, greatly admired
the “metre” and “matter,” the style and substance, of Robinson’s verse
and, in the letter quoted in the preceding, urged Southey to include
her poem “Jasper” in the second volume of his Annual Anthology.
Southey did so, along with her poem “The Haunted Beach,” “a
poem of fascinating Metre” also recommended by Coleridge (Letters
1: 575–6). The poem Coleridge specifically refers to in the epigraph
above is Robinson’s “The Poor Singing Dame,” which appeared in
the Morning Post on 25 January 1800, shortly after Robinson became
Stuart’s chief correspondent to the paper’s poetical department.9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 1989780230100251_07_ch05.indd 198 12/28/2010 11:09:01 AM12/28/2010 11:09:01 AM
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