Stuart’s Laureates II 239THE WOR LD” (13–4). She sings a “mystic strain” that seduces the
very landscape itself; the allegorical figure of Art is so “transported”
by her song that he displays his power in the building of “tow’rs and
column’d domes [that] usurp the skies” (15). The rapture and ecstasy
of Poetry’s song culminates in “bursting fountains [that] toss the
spangled show’r,” at which point Della Crusca coyly remarks, “Such
was the scene when the rapt Maiden sung, / Ah, who shall tell the
music of her tongue!” (15). The poem continues primarily in trib-
ute to English literature and culture, but surely this description of
Merry’s poem is sufficient to prove my point.
No one has recognized the similarity between “Kubla Khan” and
Diversity, but Robinson’s response to Coleridge leads directly back to
it. She understood “Kubla Khan” because of her own variform sensi-
bility, evident to us in the ways that sensibility manifests itself in variety
of forms. Both writers, at around the same time—she toward the end
of her career and he at the beginning of his—came to a similar poetics
by which they use metrical effects to represent the poetic imagination
in verse, its sounds and rhythms as well as its visions. This profound
dynamic and correspondence culminates in “Mrs. Robinson to the
Poet Coleridge,” which is characteristic of certain strains in Robinson’s
poetry from the beginning of her career. Robinson’s “extatic” praise
of Coleridge echoes her “Ode to Della Crusca,” from 1791, which
celebrates the poetic achievement of Merry’s Diversity and his bold
assertion of metrical variety. She praises Della Crusca’s “ever- varying,
ever- witching song,” and her description of his poetry is remarkably
similar to her response to Coleridge’s poem: she writes, “For well thy
dulcet notes / Can wind the mazy song, / In labyrinth of wild fan-
tastic form” (1: 102; 2–9). Many of the qualities critics since Lowes
have found in “Kubla Khan” likely would have been imperceptible to
Robinson and even to Coleridge, both of whom likely saw the poem as
an irregular ode in the Della Cruscan vein. One of the things we have
to remember about so- called Della Cruscan poetry is that to many
it did seem like a sacrifice of sense to sound, but only sense if that
means the matter of neoclassical poetry. As silly as Della Crusca and
Anna Matilda’s poetic romance may have been, it established a model
for Robinson in the deployment of metrical effects to express or to
perform the passion of poetry—the kind of ludic eroticism one is hard
pressed to find in Gray, Mason, or Collins. It was all about frisson and,
for lack of a better word, pleasure—the enjoyment of fanciful poetry
and bewitching lyrical and sensual metrical effects.
What happens to “Kubla Khan” if we read it as part of Robinson
and Coleridge’s playful, quasiprivate rekindling of a Della Cruscan9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2399780230100251_07_ch05.indd 239 12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM
10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel RobinsonCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket iTr
omso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-13