The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

46 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

innovations afforded created an apparent incongruity. Expressing

some reservations about its journalistic provenance, a critic for the

Monthly Review remarked, “all that typographical taste could do,

[Bell] has evidently done to recommend the poems before us” (449).

The poetry, though, was hardly savaged. The Monthly Review critic,

who identifies Merry as Della Crusca, actually congratulated the pub-

lic on the poems “being thus rescued from the perishing pages of

a daily print” (449). The worthiness of their preservation was part

of the marketing strategy as the narrative came to a close. While at

first the tone and taste of the poems seemed to consign them to the

commercialized and ephemeral space of the newspaper, paradoxically

their very popularity allowed them to shift registers, to be reified in

the pages of the print book.

The correspondence between Della Crusca and Anna Matilda had

worked itself up to a pitch that they could not sustain. Anna Matilda

ultimately declared herself a votary of Indifference, promising Della

Crusca only friendship and, to his dismay, chastity. Della Crusca

signed off on 17 May 1788, bidding farewell to Anna Matilda, to

England, and to poetry. His conclusion of the poetic affair impugns

Anna Matilda as nothing more than a tease:

And cou’dst thou think ’twas my design,

Calmly to list thy Notes Divine,

That I responsive Lays might send,

To gain a cold Platonic Friend?

Far other hopes thy Verse inspir’d,

And all my Breast with Passion fir’d.

This conclusion of the affair—there, of course, would be a sequel—

finds Della Crusca also blaming poetry for seducing him from more

lucrative ventures; and, in a burlesque of the conclusion of Pope’s

Eloisa to Abelard, he calls the Muse to take his “Flute,” perhaps

recalling his phallic quill, and “plunge it in Oblivion’s wave,” while

acknowledging the likelihood of the exchange’s preservation for

future readers, to whom he asserts that “no kind intercourse the Song

repaid” and that the two remained finally “a Shadow and a Shade.”

The sequence is actually a comically amoebean competition between

the two poets in which the man is motivated by his sexual frustration

and the woman by her poetic frustration, as she continues to exhort

him to control himself and to develop his mind. Poem after poem

records their adoration of and admonitions to one another; when read

as playful popular culture, they are hilarious.

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 469780230100251_03_ch01.indd 46 12/31/2010 4:20:14 PM12/31/2010 4:20:14 PM

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

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