Stuart’s Laureates II 203To Coleridge, Robinson’s “ear” is a metonym for her ability to cre-
ate pleasurable sounds through the arrangement of syllables, words,
lines, and rhymes and to present these features in stanzaic form.^2 It is
important to remember that the term metre, particularly for poets at
the end of the eighteenth century, denotes not only the metrical fea-
tures of a poetic line, or meter, which Coleridge and others frequently
call measure, but metre also refers to the stanzaic matrix that governs
the shape, if you will, of the structural units of a poem. In the two
letters to Southey, when he writes in praise of Robinson’s “metre,”
Coleridge means that he is favorably impressed not only by the way
she manages her “numbers,” or the stressed syllables per line, but also
by the construction of the nonce stanzas she employs in the develop-
ment of the three poems he singles out for approbation: “The Poor
Singing Dame,” “Jasper,” and “The Haunted Beach.”
In these poems, Robinson achieves her metrical effects through
the construction of her own unusual nonce forms. A nonce form is an
original form that a poet constructs for a particular poem, which is
then recognizable as peculiar to that poem or poet. When the nonce
form is appropriated by subsequent poets, it becomes eponymous as
a received form. The most famous example of this in English poetry
is the Spenserian stanza but obviously other examples include the
Pindaric ode, the Petrarchan sonnet, Alcaics, Sapphics, Hudibrastics,
Skeltonics, etc. The second half of the eighteenth century saw the
revival of the Pindaric and Horatian odes, the Spenserian stanza, and,
later, thanks largely to Robinson herself, the Petrarchan sonnet, but the
1790s in particular witnessed poets inventing new forms. As a writer,
Robinson worked in nearly every genre and form at her disposal; her
practice of creating her own forms, shared by many of her compeers,
arises out of her interest in fixed forms which emerged around the
middle of her career, as exemplified by Sappho and Phaon.
After proving her worth in a “legitimate” form, her ambition was
too great and her “ear” too sophisticated to miss the opportunities
for fame presented by the nonce stanza. As “the English Sappho,” she
wanted to be recognized by her own nonce- cum- eponymous form as
her poetic namesake was, and she knew well that the most popular
eponymous form of the 1790s was the “Alonzo meter,” named for the
stanza of M.G. Lewis’s romance ballad “Alonzo the Brave and Fair
Imogine” from his 1796 novel, The Monk. Before we look closely at
the three poems Coleridge specifically admired, we need to examine
the significance of this formal innovation and metrical experimentation
at the end of Robinson’s career. The features that Coleridge praises
in Robinson are directly related to the success of the “Alonzo meter”
and the revival of interest in the ballad and accentual meter—poetic9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2039780230100251_07_ch05.indd 203 12/28/2010 11:09:02 AM12/28/2010 11:09:02 AM
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