6 The Poetry of Mary Robinsonfigure, could actually choose one over the other, but because I think
her desire for poetic fame was born out of her awareness of a fine line
between her celebrity and ignominy.
This sense of literary accomplishment as a means of making good
a tarnished reputation informs nearly everything she wrote, par-
ticularly as it pertains to the forms in which she chose to write.
I focus here on Robinson’s poetry because she believed poetry to
be her “wreath of fame,” earned by demonstrable merit, by intel-
lectual prowess, and particularly by mastery of poetic form—and I
do intend the gendered connotation, as she would have done. As I
will explain over the course of this book, Robinson regarded poetic
fame since Sappho as essentially masculine, but not irretrievably so.
Throughout her literary career she consistently affiliates herself with
powerful male figures, doing so politically with statesmen such as
Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, professionally with newspaper
proprietors and publishers such as John Bell and Daniel Stuart,
and culturally with figures of artistic genius from the past such as
Petrarch, Milton, and Pope and from among contemporaries such
as Robert Merry, Joshua Reynolds, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Robinson practiced a poetics of form and fame that involves these
powerful male figures. For example, in her Monody to the Memory
of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1792), she clearly articulates her theory that
the artist through the successful manipulation of the formal ele-
ments of his craft earns through this effort his own “laurel,” the
classic symbol of poetic fame. According to Robinson, Reynolds,
in the creative act of painting his portraits, “with a fost’ring hand,
to genius just, / Twin’d his own laurel, round each youthful bust”
(1: 175; 89–90). The laurel is a metaphor for literal, textual accom-
plishment—the poem or painting itself peculiarly achieved by the
creative genius. The ultimate accolade, however, is immortality, an
article of faith that Robinson maintains throughout her career; as
such, she contends that the ultimate vindication of genius is inevi-
table. Upon his death, Reynolds may, “true to native worth, assert
his claim / To the best diadem! THE WREATH OF FAME!” (93–94).
Just as Robinson confers upon Reynolds the distinction of being
“Britain’s RAFFAELLE” (46), she repeatedly asserts her own claim
to the “wreath of fame” as “the English Sappho,” as she was called.
Robinson’s tribute, moreover, is inf lected by the fact that Reynolds
represented her in his painting. But as an artist herself, Robinson
understands that she, like Reynolds, must vindicate her worth
through the form of her art.9780230100251_02_int.indd 69780230100251_02_int.indd 6 12/28/2010 11:08:07 AM12/28/2010 11:08:07 AM
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