The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 49

Robinson to write as Petrarch’s Laura, alive and subjectified, as a lyric

agent rather than a lyrical object. Well aware that Petrarch was the first

modern poet laureate, she also understood the punning relationship

between Laura and laurel. Petrarch’s love for Laura remains famously

unconsummated, while the poet transforms her ultimately into a sym-

bol of virtue and of his own poetic achievement, the laureate, favored

by Apollo, god of poetry. Temporarily effacing her own identity and

her much- discussed sexual past, Robinson thus was able to remake

herself as an unstained avatar of poetic authority and legitimacy. At

the same time as she is inserting herself in the Della Crusca network,

she is inserting herself into an intertextual network of literary tradi-

tion, using the avatar to craft both a poetic and a professional self.

For the Laura avatar was networking, of course. Robinson likely

also read Miles Peter Andrews’s love poem “To Laura,” signed

“A rley,” i n The Poetry of the World, which appeared first in the

paper on 1 September 1787 (2: 52–4). Robinson knew Andrews

from her days in the theatre and among the fashionable elite

(Memoirs 7: 236), so her choice of pseudonym may suggest the

assumption of the role of Arley’s beloved and thus signaling her

desire to participate in the network established by The Poetry of

the World. The “Laura” Arley addresses, as its headnote indicates,

was an actress he loved but who has died—thus the allusion to

Petrarch’s deceased Laura. The original headnote from the World

in 1787 remains unchanged through all subsequent reprintings

of the poem in The Poetry of the World and in the four editions

of Bell’s British Album: “The following Lines were the earliest

offering to a Young Lady—whose Theatric talents once formed

the ornament of the Stage—on which she appeared; and whose

Memory will be honoured by the Drama which she adorned.” If

Robinson is alluding to Arley’s poem, then she here too takes on

the persona of an adored but deceased young woman, but this

time she is an actress, again a figurative effacement of her past. As

a playwright, and one of the oldest in the group, Andrews surely

knew many young actresses, so there is no reason to believe that

this poem in any way refers to Robinson, who was still in Europe

and no longer supposed dead when it first appeared. In fact, the

celebrated actress Mary Ann Yates had just died in May of 1787.

Yates, Andrews, and Robinson all were aff iliated with Drury Lane

and thus with the network around David Garrick and thus with

Sheridan. Robinson appeared on stage with Yates, as she recalls

in her Memoirs (7: 244, 374). In addition to the Petrarchan sig-

nificance, Robinson may have picked the name out of The Poetry

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 499780230100251_03_ch01.indd 49 12/31/2010 4:20:15 PM12/31/2010 4:20:15 PM

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