The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 235

Robinson’s poetic reading of “Kubla Khan” fixes Coleridge’s

“extatic” poem in form. This is what she does best—this formal per-

formativity. If her poetic performances are theatrical, then they are

not so much performances of characters as they are the staging, dress-

ing, and blocking of words and ideas as fixed forms prominently dis-

played. In this way, her poem to Coleridge exposes a poetical secret

to readers, a secret Coleridge himself would keep from them for the

next sixteen years. When he finally published the poem, he was deter-

mined either to mystify it or to apologize for it with the subterfuge

and of his red herring of a preface, “Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan,”

which famously complicates the reading of the poem. In it, Coleridge

seems to advise the reader not to take the poem seriously, or possibly,

more obliquely, to make a claim for its value by liberating the text

from a fixed, determinate intention. Coleridge, writing about himself

in the third person, explicitly instructs the reader to view the poem

as a “psychological curiosity,” instead of as a literary text with “sup-

posed poetic merits.” As Kathleen M. Wheeler points out, the reader

would be unlikely to think of the poem “as any more a fragment than

any other poem” without Coleridge’s calling it such (20). But why

was Coleridge so defensive of, even embarrassed by, “Kubla Khan”?

The a nswer lies in t he sim ila rit y of Robinson’s pra ise of Coleridge’s

poem and her poetic adulation of Della Crusca almost a decade ear-

lier. At the end of Robinson’s life, Coleridge became for her a new

Della Crusca, the poet who initially represented her poetic engender-

ing. While it is commonplace today to read the composition of “Kubla

Khan” as a watershed moment in literary Romanticism, Robinson’s

response to Coleridge’s seemingly iconoclastic poem reveals that, for-

mally at least, “Kubla Khan” is fundamentally, even essentially, Della

Cruscan. Could it be that, after Gifford’s Baviad, which remained

in circulation for years, the rapid decline in the public’s appreciation

for anything resembling the poetry of Della Crusca explains why

Coleridge withheld the poem from publication for nearly twenty

years? Is this why he presented it finally as a “psychological curiosity”

instead of a literary text replete with any “supposed poetic merits”?

Coleridge and Robinson obviously enjoyed rekindling the poetic f lir-

tations of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda; after her death, however,

as we have seen, Coleridge was not so keen on preserving that f lirta-

tion for posterity. “Kubla Khan” evidently was one of these poems.

As Tim Fulford puts it, Coleridge “admired her for exactly that for

which he praised the Abyssinian maid—her music” (“Mary Robinson

and the Abyssinian Maid” 18). Perhaps this is why he shared the

poem with her, to f latter her and to f lirt with her by calling her his

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10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel Robinson

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