The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

122 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

that the skill required to compose the legitimate sonnet is “thrown

away upon the many; for, as long as the multitude in another respect,

will prefer an English or Scots tune to an Italian air or finale, so long

will the common ear prefer the simple sonnet, viz. that composed of

three stanzas of alternate rhimes [sic] and a couplet” (24). Although

Reid claims to intend no “derogation” of Smith’s genius, his essay on

“unlettered genius” does impugn at the very least the literary tastes

of contemporary readers who fail to appreciate the skill required in

the composition of more difficult kinds of poetry.

As her full title suggests, Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon directly

engages the debate over the merits of the legitimate and the illegiti-

mate sonnet forms. As early as 1794, the Critical Review complained

that, since the prodigious success of Smith and her scores of imita-

tors, “we begin to be almost satiated with sonnets” (Rev. of Sonnets

114). In response, in 1796 Robinson strategically positions herself as

an exceptional poet and her sequence as following the examples of

Petrarch and of Milton—not of Smith. Her remarkable preface cen-

sures the “modern sonnet” popularized by Smith as facile and hack-

neyed. Echoing the eighteenth- century distaste for the Shakespearean

or illegitimate sonnet, Robinson writes that this form, “concluding

with two lines, winding up the sentiment of the whole, confines the

poet’s fancy, and frequently occasions an abrupt termination of a

beautiful and interesting picture” (1: 320). Like Milton before her

and Wordsworth after her, Robinson objects to the concluding cou-

plet but also to the hard closure of a single sonnet. Because the form

may resist this hard closure, she recognizes the expansive potential

afforded by the legitimate sonnet for “a series of sketches” that form

“a complete and connected story” (1: 320). But what Robinson is

most invested in is the assertion of poetic superiority explicit in her

adoption of a form “so seldom attempted in the English language”—

the legitimate sonnet, as mastered by Milton. Robinson provides

Milton’s sonnet “To the Nightingale,” first published in his 1645

collection, as a significant precedent by which to measure her own

achievement. She cannily selects a sonnet by Milton that will remind

her readers of how hackneyed the nightingale topos had become after

150 years, and thus also of Smith’s several sonnets that employ it.^11

Moreover, in order to assert her own “classical” legitimacy, she must

denounce the popular form:

To enumerate the variety of authors who have written sonnets of all

descriptions, would be endless; indeed few of them deserve notice: and

where, among the heterogeneous mass of insipid and laboured efforts,

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1229780230100251_05_ch03.indd 122 12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM12/28/2010 11:08:40 AM

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