The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

116 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

his manual on Conjugal Love, reprinted in England in French and

English throughout the eighteenth century, seventeenth- century

physician Nicolas Venette attributed Sappho’s fate to an enlarged cli-

toris (9). Addison wondered in Spectator 223 that, considering “the

Character that is given of her Works, whether it is not for the Benefit

of Mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching

Tenderness and Rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have

given them a reading” (15 November 1711). In 1740, the entry on

Sappho in the Biographia Classica remarks that, after her husband’s

death, Sappho was “unable to confine that Passion to one person” and

that sexual desire “was too violent in her to be restrained even to one

sex” (43). But these accounts of Sappho ultimately reaffirm the poet’s

doomed but insistently heterosexual passion for Phaon. As Addison

writes, “Sappho so transported with the Violence of her Passion, that

she was resolved to get rid of it at any Price”—her famously fatal leap

from the Leucadian rock in a desperate effort to cure her hopeless

passion. The desire to normalize Sappho’s sexuality goes as far back

as Menander’s play The Leukadia (ca. 300 BC), which is the most

likely source for the story of Sappho’s rejection by the handsome fer-

ryman Phaon and subsequent suicide. In the eighteenth century, the

issue of Sappho’s sexuality was a vexed one, although interest in her

was revived by new translations of Longinus and Ovid that engen-

dered reassessments of her poetry and retellings of her ostensibly

heterosexual history.^3 Alessandro Vierri’s 1782 hugely popular novel

Le Avventure di Saffo, poetessa di Mitilene, for example, retells the

Sappho and Phaon story, concluding with the poet’s fatal leap, and

refutes Sappho’s supposed tribadism and “dissolute habits” (2: 213).

Thomas Cadell, one of John Bell’s competitors in the Strand, pub-

lished an English translation, The Adventures of Sappho, in 1789.^4

So, when the Monthly Review in 1791 hailed Robinson as the

“English Sappho,” it was primarily commendatory, although the

implied allusion to the story of Sappho’s frenzied passion for Phaon—

her “wanton fervor”—would have reminded everyone of Robinson’s

own history as the rejected lover of the Prince of Wales. The epi-

thet already had unsavory associations. Aphra Behn, for instance,

had been compared with Sappho but not favorably: In his 1691 “The

Poetess, A Satyr,” Robert Gould mocked Behn’s poor health, imply-

ing venereal disease and calling her “Sapho, famous for Her Gout and

Guilt.” He adds, “For Punk and Poetess agree so Pat, / You cannot

well be This, and not be That” (16–7). Similarly, William Wycherley

portrayed Behn as a promiscuous and syphilitic Sappho in his poem

“To the Sappho of the Age, Suppos’d to Ly- In of a Love- Distemper,

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1169780230100251_05_ch03.indd 116 12/28/2010 11:08:39 AM12/28/2010 11:08:39 AM

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

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