The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

204 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

practices that are comparable with his own and which were shared by

contemporary working poets, including Robinson. In the poems under

con s ider at ion , R obi n s on’s pr ac t ice der i ve s , i n ot her word s , d i re c t l y f rom

Lewis’s, but Lewis’s practice must also be viewed as part of a larger

context involving prosody and poetic form in the romantic ballad.

Idle and Extravagant Stories in Verse

By “romantic ballad,” I mean to explicitly employ period- specific ter-

minology. What we now think of as the rise of the gothic novel in

the 1790s, in its original context, was for readers of the time a craze

for supernatural romances. This is the “degrading thirst after out-

rageous stimulation” that Wordsworth condemns in the preface to

Lyrical Ballads. There, he complains that “the works of Shakespeare

and Milton are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stu-

pid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in

verse” (747). As Michael Gamer has shown, Wordsworth’s enterprise

here is to reject, or at least to obfuscate, the inf luence of these popular

romances on his own 1800 book (Romanticism 119). He especially

means to distance his narrative poems—the “lyrical ballads”—from

the “deluges of idle and extravagant stories and verse,” or supernatu-

ral metrical romances such as “Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine.”^3

It is such stories in verse that concern us here, because Coleridge’s

appreciation of Robinson’s form catches her participating in this

trend, out of which her Lyrical Tales as well as his and Wordsworth’s

Lyrical Ballads was born. And it is worth noting that the three poems

Coleridge praises are directly inf luenced by Lyrical Ballads and by

the romantic ballad as popularized by Lewis. Even after his fiction

became passé, Lewis continued to receive praise for his innovative

stanza. Reviewing the eighteenth- century ballad revival from the van-

tage point of 1830, Walter Scott, in his “Essay on Imitations of the

Ancient Ballad,” which prefaces his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,

commended Lewis for his innovations in narrative poetry, particu-

larly the form of his “Alonzo the Brave”:

In his poetry as well as his prose, Mr Lewis had been a successful

imitator of the Germans, both in his attachment to the ancient ballad

and in the tone of superstition which they willingly mingle with it.

New arrangements of the stanza, and a varied construction of verses,

were also adopted and welcomed as an addition of a new string to the

British harp. In this respect, the stanza in which “Alonzo the Brave” is

written, was greatly admired, and received as an improvement worthy

of adoption into English poetry. (34)

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