The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 207

he or she partakes of its already established fame. Furthermore, this

manner of reading such interpolated poems as “Alonzo and Imogine”

and “The Doublet of Grey” out of their original contexts freed the

narrative poem from its more unsavory fictional connections and

inf luenced a whole tradition of Romantic verse- narrative. Lewis’s

success with “the Alonzo meter” provided Robinson with a model

that inspired her poetic composition in the final years of her life. This

single poem and its peculiar meter would go on to have a greater

impact on subsequent (Romantic) poets’ approaches to form than it

has received credit for having done.

Lewis’s “Alonzo meter” also provides a useful touchstone for

explaining how Coleridge, Robinson, Southey, and Stuart recognized

and appreciated new shapes and sounds in these innovative forms.

Doing so foregrounds some aspects of poetic practice that we oth-

erwise might overlook, but which are germane to Coleridge’s praise

of Robinson’s robust metrical practice. The popularity of antiquarian

poetry inspired a tendency in narrative poetry and ballads for poets

to work in more intrinsically English and Germanic rhythmic quali-

tative or accentual lines that replicate the feel of an oral tradition of

minstrelsy. This is not to say that English poets forego foot verse, but

they begin counting stresses in their lines instead of the total number

of syllables. This is how Coleridge arrives at the “new principle” he

articulates in his preface to “Christabel” (1816). Clarifying that the

poem’s meter is not “properly speaking, irregular,” Coleridge explains

that he has founded it on “a new principle: namely, that of counting

in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary

from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be

only four” (vii). Similarly, he wrote to Byron in 1815 that “I count

by Beats or accents instead of syllables—in the belief that a metre

might be thus produced sufficiently uniform & far more malleable

to the Passion & Meaning” (Letters 4: 603). These practices ref lect

the influence of German theories that linguistically suit the accentu-

ally nuanced native rhythms of the English language derived from

the Germanic Anglo- Saxon. The gothic romance obviously depends

upon the medieval for its atmosphere, so the poems that emerge out

of it also reveal the inf luence of the eighteenth- century ballad revival

and similar experimentation with the traditional ballad stanza and

its meter. These poems look back to the more rugged folk meters of

medieval ballads, before the inf luence of syllabic continental verse

and Chaucer’s adaptation of those principles. Obviously, the gothic

elements of poems such as Lewis’s “Alonzo and Imogine” derive

from Percy’s Reliques—“Sweet William’s Ghost,” for instance—and

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2079780230100251_07_ch05.indd 207 12/28/2010 11:09:02 AM12/28/2010 11:09:02 AM

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