Introduction 13forms and interests during the period; and Paula R. Backshcheider’s
Eighteenth- Century Women Poets and Their Poetry is an in- depth
study of how women poets worked in those forms that definitively
integrate them into literary history. Now, as Beth Lau asserts, we are
ready to move beyond recovery and to study “interrelations between
literary men and women” (3). Studies such as Wolfson’s Borderlines,
Stephen C. Behrendt’s British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing
Community, and Lau’s collection Fellow Romantics demonstrate new
interest in showing men and women writers of the period in dialogue
and literary interaction. Wolfson’s book treats gender as a kind of
literary form itself, which employs language that can provide a mul-
tiplicity of valences. As Wolfson shows, gender in literature is practi-
cally another kind of intertextuality, with masculine and feminine
subjectivities free to employ language and figures that perform liter-
ary cross- dressing. Behrendt, too, takes a fresh look at intertextuality
as a complex web that interconnects men and women poets of the
period and shows that they shared many of the same assumptions
about gender and genre. The tendency in the past may have been to
lament these in women and to castigate them in men, but objectively
we must see these assumptions as part of the fabric of the period. And
Pascoe rightly reminds us that making new generalizations about
women poets as if they shared some common poetic aesthetic is just
as problematically monolithic as the phallocentric Romantic ideology
from which we have sought to liberate them (see “ ‘Unsex’d’ ”).
In what follows, I focus on Robinson’s representations of herself
as a poet in interaction with other poets and other poems, and on
how she tends to formalize these representations in specific instances
of self- conscious virtuosity. I also highlight how Robinson’s maneu-
verings, her affiliations, and her opportunism figured around her
associations with Merry and Coleridge as poetic bookends, with Bell
and Stuart as professional ones. The first chapter proposes a method
for understanding the most important aspect of her poetical self-
representations—her pseudonyms, which I call avatars because they
are neither costumes nor disguises but versionings of her poetic iden-
tity. Because I argue that Robinson’s greatest virtue is her metrical
virtuosity, I want to show, also in chapter one, how the start of her
career as a professional poet is grounded in a ludic- erotic poetics that
is established by her association with Merry as Della Crusca. The gen-
erally reviled poetry of the Della Cruscans is more playful than critics
have given it credit for being. But, as I will show in chapter two, the
ludic impulses of the Della Crusca network cannot be sustained in9780230100251_02_int.indd 139780230100251_02_int.indd 13 12/28/2010 11:08:09 AM12/28/2010 11:08:09 AM
10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel RobinsonCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket iTr
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