The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

252 Notes

“St. James’s Street,” see Curran (“Mary Robinson and the New Lyric”

12–3) and Behrendt (British Women Poets 54–6). Behrendt’s com-

mentary is revised from his important earlier essay, which appeared

in his collection Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press, one of the

first studies to renew interest in Robinson’s radicalism since her recov-

ery and to place her work in context among other women poets with

radical inf lections. In 1947, I should note, M. Ray Adams included

a chapter on Robinson’s career and her politics in his foundational

Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism.

4. Jones examines in greater detail the two poems and their contexts.


5. The poem appears as the final poem in my edition (2: 221), where I
   mistakenly placed it as having first appeared in 1806. Although the
   1806 text differs in only a couple of substantives from the 1797 text,
   the poem belongs among the poems of December 1797 from the
   Morning Post—as Craciun’s discovery rightly indicates; see her British
   Women Poets and the French Revolution (79–80). In the quotation
   given here, I have provided the full poem from the Morning Post.


6. Because of my focus on the newspaper poetry, extensive commen-
   tary on Robinson’s Lyrical Tales is (regrettably) beyond the scope of
   my study. In addition to Vargo’s, other significant studies of Lyrical
   Tales include Stuart Curran’s “Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in
   Context,” Ashley Cross’s “From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales,”
   and Labbe’s “Def lected Violence” and Romantic Paradox (103 –21).
   See also Betsy Bolton’s article “Romancing the Stone,” reprinted in
   her Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage (106–38), which
   discusses a number of the poems in Lyrical Tales. Robin Miskolcze
   also examines Robinson’s narrative poems about “exiles and fugi-
   tives,” most of which she wrote at the end of her career.


7. S e e Paradise Lost: “So gloz’d the Tempter” (9.549).


8. Curran’s “Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context” compares
   her poetry with Wordsworth’s and Southey’s in greater detail than
   I can do here. See also Michael Wiley’s comparison of Robinson’s
   “The Deserted Cottage,” Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage,” and
   Southey’s “The Ruined Cottage” from English Eclogues.


9. Pascoe also identifies an “antifeminist” tone in Tabitha Bramble’s
   poems, which she rightly describes as “bits of comic business meant
   primarily, if not solely, to amuse” (181). Vargo’s reading of the
   Tabitha Bramble poems finds more positive social messages in them
   than perhaps mine does.


10. See “Lines, on Reading Mr. Pratt’s Volume ‘Gleaning through
    England’ ” (2: 6–8), “Laura Maria to Peter Pindar, Esq.” (2: 8–9),
    “On Seeing the Crayon Landscapes of Peter Pindar” (2: 10–1).


11. For examples of Laura Maria’s sentimental and/or melancholy
    poems, see “To the Wild Brook” (2: 9–10), “Anacreontic” (13–4),
    “The Nettle and the Daisy” (31–2). For her morally didactic ones,
    see “The Miser” (17–8) and “The Gamester” (29–30).

9780230100251_08_not.indd 2529780230100251_08_not.indd 252 12/28/2010 12:31:43 PM12/28/2010 12:31:43 PM

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

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