The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates I 163

merge categories and complicate the terms, showing how they over-

lap, interrelate, and imperfectly represent a reality that is abundant

and complex” (117). Robinson’s use of fixed forms for the Portia

avatar, including the couplet and the quatrain, remind us that such

formal choices are endemic to the program of so much eighteenth-

century poetry and help us to recover “the cultural desire to instruct

and modify not only individuals but the culture they are part of”

(Hunter 129). The point of Robinson’s juxtapositions is fairly

straightforward—a well- chosen, rhetorical move given the context of

the newspaper and its audience, but their formal balance is also meant

to be read as a function of Portia’s superlative reason and justice. Her

dominant mode would be one of reasoned and balanced judgment.

Curran asserts that “January, 1795” is a poem “pointedly without

progress” and lacks “resolution” (“Mary Robinson” 13). True, it is a

montage of images that do not lead to a determinate conclusion such

as Bancks’s punchline with its implied assessment—“This is LONDON!

How d’ye like it?” (338). But Robinson’s poem aggregates contrasts

in order to perform a censure of the values of her society, and there is

most certainly a cumulative effect as her irony becomes increasingly

and palpably bitter and indignant: her litany of vices returns repeat-

edly to the culture’s neglect of creative artists as it variously catalogs

representations of adultery, injury, deception, greed, ambition, lux-

ury, opulence, poverty, and belligerence. Finally it ends:

Honest men, who can’t get places;

Knaves, who shew unblushing faces;

Ruin hasten’d, Peace retarded!

Candour spurn’d, and Art^ rewarded! (1: 317; 41–4)

Abrupt as it may seem, the conclusion is a consummation of the accu-

mulation not only of images but of sarcastic antitheses in this final

indictment of 1790s decadence. While the poem may feature “disas-

sembled signifiers,” as Curran puts it, Robinson’s Portia intones a

overt didacticism that accords with the avatar and with the fixed form

of the poem.

Mrs. Robinson’s Voice

After “January, 1795,” Robinson silenced Portia. For the next cou-

ple of years, however, Robinson sought to augment her own voice

by eschewing for the most part the use of avatars, during which

time she concentrated on her most ambitious projects, including the

9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1639780230100251_06_ch04.indd 163 12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM

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