The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 205

Coleridge predicted as much when he reviewed The Monk in February

of 1797 for the Critical Review. While Coleridge was generally

appalled by most of the novel, he does reserve some mild praise for

Lewis’s poetry as “far above mediocrity.” Closing the review with the

poem “The Exile,” extracted from the novel, Coleridge addresses an

underlying concern similar to Wordsworth’s—that such popular stuff

may overshadow more literature of greater merit and legitimacy; the

“exquisitely tender elegy,” Coleridge asserts, “will melt and delight

the heart, when ghosts and hobgoblins shall be found only in the

lumber- garret of a circulating library” (198). In Coleridge’s review

of The Monk, we see him privileging the techniques of lyric versifi-

cation over the ephemeral pleasures of sensational fiction, or what

would have seemed to the poet the elegance of formal construction

versus the mere scribbling of a story. Poetically minded critics such as

Coleridge possessed tools for appreciating Lewis’s versification, but

lacked a coherent perspective on this popular new genre. Robinson

knew that she had to please such critics.

Robinson certainly was one to take note of another poet’s suc-

cess in a particular form. Around the time that Lewis’s The Monk

was causing such a sensation, she had also begun inventing her own

forms, such as in the three poems Coleridge praises to Southey.

Robinson’s practice of creating her own forms comes from her formal

extravagance, but it also derives from her experience as a novelist.

It is no mere coincidence that the most practiced eponymous form

of the 1790s comes from a novel. Writers such as Robinson, Lewis,

Charlotte Smith, and Ann Radcliffe frequently interpolated poems

throughout their novels. According to most reviewers, Robinson’s

interpolated poems were the highlights of reading her fiction because

they appeared more carefully constructed than the narrative context

in which they are set. Robinson also knew that interspersing poetry

throughout works of prose fiction increased the likelihood of atten-

tion in the press, because these poems were more easily excerpted

from the work and reprinted, as Coleridge’s review of The Monk and

most reviews of her novels demonstrate. If not integral to the devel-

opment of plot, they occasionally served the development of the char-

acters who supposedly penned them and provided an entertaining

respite from the frequently convoluted and seemingly chaotic nar-

ratives Robinson, for one, tended to provide. Radcliffe and Lewis

were particularly inventive and innovative in achieving such formal

spectacles. For example, Radcliffe’s 1791 novel The Romance of the

Forest and her 1794 blockbuster The Mysteries of Udolpho feature her

peculiar eighteen- line sonnets. Robinson’s lyrical ebullience naturally

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2059780230100251_07_ch05.indd 205 12/28/2010 11:09:02 AM12/28/2010 11:09:02 AM

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