250 Notes- R .D. Haven s’s The Influence of Milton on English Poetry is still the
most thorough study of the history of the sonnet after Milton. His
bibliography of eighteenth- century sonnets is remarkably compre-
hensive and extremely useful. - For more on the formal history of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, see my
article on “Formal Paradoxy.” I also discuss Smith’s place in the
Romantic- period revival in “Reviving the Sonnet” and “To Scorn or
To Scorn Not the Sonnet.” - See in particular Sonnets III and VII from Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets.
- For more on Seward’s theory of the “sonnet’s claim” and her hostil-
ity to Smith’s illegitimate sonnets see my “Reviving the Sonnet.” - Referring to the illegitimate sonnet, Henry Crabb Robinson wrote
that Wordsworth, who preferred the legitimate sonnet as practiced
by Milton over Shakespeare’s form, considered “it to be absolutely
a vice to have a sharp turning at the end with an epigrammatical
point” (485). For more on Wordsworth’s views of the sonnet, see
my “ ‘Still Glides the Stream’ ” and “To Scorn or To Scorn Not the
Sonnet.” - Addison’s remarks on Sappho appear in Spectator 223 (15 November
1711), 229 (22 November 1711), and 233 (27 November 1711). A
second edition of Fawkes’s Works of Anacreon, Sappho, Bion, Moschus,
and Musæus had been published 1789; the selections in the Complete
Edition were excerpts from this earlier publication. - I echo the title of Elizabeth D. Harvey’s article “Ventriloquizing
Sappho, or the Lesbian Muse,” which examines Donne’s homoerotic
“Sappho to Philaenis” in relation to Ovid’s text. This and other
essays by Glenn W. Most, Yopie Prins, and Harriette Andreadis
in Ellen Greene’s collection Re- Reading Sappho: Reception and
Trans mis sion have informed my understanding of Sappho’s modern
reception. - In his study of Petrarch in Romantic England, Zuccato looks at
Robinson in her Della Cruscan context and also reads her “Petrarch
to Laura” in relation to Sappho and Phaon (73–93). - Robinson was not the first to adapt the heroic epistle to Petrarch’s
situation. Dobson’s Life of Petrarch inspired the publication of new
translations and great interest in the Italian poet, who became an
icon of the literature of Sensibility. In 1780, Rev. Joseph Plymley
published A Poetical Epistle from Petrarch to Laura and, in 1786,
Charles James published Petrarch to Laura, A Poetical Epistle—both
based on Dobson’s Life and modeled on the Ovidian heroic epis-
tle. Plymley’s Petrarch is scrupulously chaste, while James’s displays
more of the passionate frustration of Pope’s Eloisa. But both miss
entirely the formal cross- dressing that Ovid’s Heroides established
and that Pope and Robinson clearly understood. I have found no
heroic epistles in the eighteenth century that represent Laura writing
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10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel RobinsonCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket iTr
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