The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 43

A playful network emerges when we consider the maneuverings

and in- jokes of its participants and the evidence of such in the vari-

ous texts and paratexts of the World. They clearly were having fun

with it; and so was the public, who became involved in the fiction

of the Della Cruscans just as readers would follow the serial narra-

tives of Dickens or, today, on television. I doubt many of them cared

whether it was real or not. It was charming and entertaining.^14 But

when read closely, the exchange is not all “sex in the head.” Much of

it is about formal and metrical play, with Anna Matilda frequently

criticizing Della Crusca’s essays in verse. The formal engagement is

part of the pleasure derived from these heteroerotic exchanges, these

textual thrusts and parries; this is important for understanding Mary

Robinson’s beginning her career with Della Crusca, and it will be

necessary for understanding the end of her career as she engages with

Coleridge (to be discussed further in chapter five). Take, for example,

Anna Matilda’s poem “To Della Crusca” from 22 December 1787,

her fourth poem to him: in it, she responds to the tone and to the

form of Della Crusca’s previous poems, encouraging him to write

something new and different. Her poem opens, “I HATE the Elegiac

lay— / Choose me a measure jocund as the day!” In the previous

weeks, Della Crusca had published his poem on prison-reformer John

Howard and his antiwar Fontenoy poem; but more to her point is the

fact that his previous two poems have been in elegiac quatrains—his

popular “Elegy Written on the Plain of Fontenoy” (16 Nov. 1787)

and his latest “To Anna Matilda” (5 December 1787). She points out

that he should vary his meter after two poems in the same form and

urges him to do something wildly irregular:

And be thy lines irregular, and free!

Poetic chains should fall, before such bards as thee.

Scorn the dull laws that pinch thee round,

Raising about thy verse a mound,

O’er which thy Muse so lofty! dares not bound.

Bid her in verse meandering sport;

Her footsteps quick, or long, or short

Just as her various impulse wills—

Scorning the frigid square, which her fine fervor chills. (World 22

December 1787)

This passage portends much for the reading of Mary Robinson’s

poetry—and her prosody—for it prefigures the way she will respond

to Merry’s poetry and ultimately to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” The

varying meters here also illustrate precisely the advice Anna Matilda

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 439780230100251_03_ch01.indd 43 12/31/2010 4:20:13 PM12/31/2010 4:20:13 PM

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

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