The English Sappho 121decidedly male perspectives. The Renaissance tradition had firmly
established sonnet writing as the domain of male poets, usually for
the purpose of wooing women or for establishing reputations at court.
Dorothy Mermin argues that women poets of the seventeenth century
such as Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Anne Finch became poets
by avoiding direct competition with male poets; they did not write
sonnets, for example (336). They generally chose forms that “seemed
safely unambitious” such as pastorals, fables, and lyrics (341). In order
to exist, Mermin contends, they had to avoid formal territory usually
occupied by men. Thus, there are few extant sonnets by women from
the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, when the sonnet was a mark of
skill and wit and when mostly male poets practiced it.^8
Robinson would not have known about the major exception
from this earlier period—Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnets, which were
lost during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and for most
of the twentieth. She did, however, have before her the example
of Charlotte Smith, whose hugely successful Elegiac Sonnets went
through ten ever- expanding editions between 1784 and 1811, earn-
ing the respect of readers, poets, and critics. Neglected by poets
and despised by readers after Milton’s use of the form, the son-
net fell into disuse and disrepute during the Restoration and early
eighteenth century despite its earlier dominance and status.^9 With
Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays (1784), however, Smith became the
first woman poet of the eighteenth century to publish a series of
sonnets and single- handedly revived the sonnet for the Romantic
period. Smith’s formal designation of them as “elegiac” is her way
of admitting that they are, technically, illegitimate because her pre-
ferred sonnet form consists of three elegiac quatrains and a couplet.^10
Of the ninety- two sonnets published in her Elegiac Sonnets by the
posthumous tenth edition of 1811, only two faithfully follow the
Petrarchan model: Sonnet XXXII, “To Melancholy,” and Sonnet
XXXIV, “To a Friend.” The majority are irregular in construction,
and thus “illegitimate.” Smith’s success gave license to poets eager to
take liberties with the form and a debate ensued as to the propriety
of Smith’s example. Smith’s success in what was considered to be
an easier form appeared to some as an example of the degradation
of poetry in popular culture. As W. Hamilton Reid recognized in
1790, Smith’s sonnets appealed to a large readership because of their
simplicity; calling the sonnet “the mode of writing that has attracted
the most of the public attention” in recent years, Reid writes that
Smith’s success proves that “the more simple these [sonnets] are in
their construction, the longer they will please” (24). He also stresses9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1219780230100251_05_ch03.indd 121 12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM
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