The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

238 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

will see the poem as essentially Della Cruscan. Indeed, the most obvi-

ous poetic precursor to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is Della Crusca’s

Diversity, A Poem (1788), which is more contemporaneous with the

composition of “Kubla Khan” than is Coleridge’s preface to the poem.

And in his preface to that poem, Merry defends his irregular metri-

cal practices and takes issue with Mason regarding the regular ode,

as I have already noted. Merry’s poem, like Collins’s and Warton’s

odes—and like “Kubla Khan”—surveys its poetic predecessors, with

Merry placing his own Della Crusca avatar in a lineage proceeding

not from Italian poets, but from Chaucer through such English poets

as Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Collins, Akenside, up to him-

self and a few other contemporaries. “Kubla Khan” is obviously a

more oblique and more provocative, endlessly compelling poem com-

pared with Diversity, but Coleridge’s composition does owe much

of its style and substance to Della Crusca. As Jeffrey C. Robinson

suggests, Merry’s Diversity is an allegory of poetic imagination or

the “poetics of the Fancy” (119). As such, it opens with a powerful

masculine creative force surveying his domain:

’TWA S on a mountain’s airy spire,

With eye that f lash’d celestial fire,

That quench’d the dawn’s expanding ray,

And pre- assumed the day,

Immortal GENIUS stood. (11)

Obviously, I mean to compare this with the opening of Coleridge’s

poem where the Khan commands the construction of his palace.

“Kubla Khan,” a poem about creation, has its opening stanza echo

not only Purchas’s account of Kubla’s command, but God’s as well

in the act of Creation from Genesis. Xanadu, the site of Kubla’s

“pleasure- dome” is clearly a version of Paradise, although Coleridge

shrewdly withholds the word Paradise until the end of the poem.

In Coleridge’s mind, like that of most poets, it is a short step from

Genesis to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Newlyn provocatively claims that

“if Kubla is God, he is also Milton” (236). Indeed, in Merry’s poem,

Milton is one of the chief reasons the personification of Genius prefers

“BRITAIN’S isle” as the “Dear proud Asylum of my favor’d race” (12).

Genius goes on to describe all of the features that combine to make

English poetry superior and thereby summons the personification of

“Extatic POETRY,” the “vivifying Maid” herself (13). She is a highly

eroticized figure, the paramour of Genius, who is her “SACRED SOUL’S

ETERNAL LOR D” and for whom she “WITH NAKED BR EAST DEFIED

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2389780230100251_07_ch05.indd 238 12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM

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

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