The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

126 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” “This” is of course the

sonnet, and Robinson understood the conceit.^13

Sapphic Petrarch, Petrarchan Sappho

For her ambitious assertion of poetic legitimacy in the Petrarchan

sonnet, Robinson chose the familiar story of the Lesbian poet Sappho

and her doomed love for Phaon. Because of her own history of disas-

trous liaisons, Robinson certainly expected her readers to perceive

an identification on her part with the tale of the passionate love of

a woman poet for a man who eventually abandons her. Sappho and

Phaon, as her readers soon would recognize, is autobiographical in

some respects: Robinson’s long- time relationship with Tarleton was

at the time of writing in its final throes, and they would part ways

shortly after its publication. More important, Robinson’s Sappho and

Phaon is her most carefully crafted poetic achievement, designed to

portray “the human mind, enlightened by the most exquisite talents,

yet yielding to the destructive controul of ungovernable passions”

(1: 324). Robinson’s formal and intertextual choices demonstrate an

intentional refashioning of what it means for her to be the modern

Sappho. The rhetoric of her preface helps her to assert her poetic cre-

dentials, but the primary way for Robinson to direct the reception

of herself is through poetic form. Sappho and Phaon is Robinson’s

attempt to assert masculine authority over her poetry and her rep-

utation. If she is going to be the English Sappho, in other words,

Robinson wants to make sure that it is on her terms. Those terms,

however, paradoxically are borrowed, defined by Petrarch and Ovid

more than they are by Sappho. In Sappho and Phaon, Robinson

uses the figure of Sappho and the form of the Petrarchan sonnet

to reinstate a heteroerotic poetics that is not so much gendered as it

is sexed—practically a Wollstonecraftian move. In doing so, she re-

legitimizes the lyric voice that the Ovidian “Sapho to Phaon” silences,

and normalizes Sappho’s sexuality through Petrarch’s form. This is

where my reading of the sequence most differs from McGann’s in

The Poetics of Sensibility. Where he seeks to reclaim Sappho and Phaon

as “a central document” in the tradition of Sensibility (94), I see

Robinson attempting to overwrite the image of a feminized and sen-

sible Petrarch in late eighteenth- century popular culture with a mas-

culine, heteroerotic denunciation of the destructive emotions that she

associates with her namesake, Sappho, the pre- eminent woman poet.

In both the preface and the sequence proper, Robinson orders a

network of literary association and poetic intertextuality. In addition to

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

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