The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates I 185

his position as such. Since the 1990 publication of The Feminist

Companion to Literature in English, where she was first identified

as “poetry editor” (916), more than a dozen scholars, again includ-

ing myself, have made the assertion, in nearly identical words, that

Robinson succeeded Southey as poetry editor for the Morning Post.

Ta k i ng t h i s f o r g r a nte d , a s I pr e p a r e d my e d it ion of R ob i n s on’s p o e t r y,

I expected one day to go through the newspapers again to examine

more carefully the other poetry that appeared during her tenure as

“poetry editor,” figuring that this would provide new insight into

Robinson’s taste and literary judgment. I also assumed that Southey,

as her predecessor, would have performed similar duties, not just com-

posing but also selecting, rejecting, soliciting, and editing poetry for

the Post’s “Poet ica l Depa r t ment.” Th is representat ion of her as poet r y

editor most likely originates in Robert D. Bass’s The Green Dragoon:

The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (1957), which was

until recently the only remotely reliable biographical source available.

Bass twice refers to her as being responsible for editing the poetry page

(386, 394). Although Bass provides no citations for the source of this

information, he likely read a long biographical essay on Tarleton in

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for October of 1874 that describes

Robinson has having “been promoted to the superintendence of the

poetical department of the ‘Morning Post’ ” (“Sir Banastre Tarleton”

447). A similar remark appears in Smucker’s 1874 A History of the

Four Georges, Kings of England (327). So, since 1990, the claim that

Robinson was poetry editor has been repeated in almost every book

or article that discusses Robinson’s poetry and now even appears in

the headnotes to selections by Robinson in both the Norton and the

Longman anthologies of English literature.^12 Of the recent commen-

taries, Stuart Curran’s account thus is the most accurate, writing that

Robinson “succeeded [Southey] as Daniel Stuart’s chief correspon-

dent to the ‘Poetical Department’ of the Morning Post when he left

for Portugal at the end of 1799” (“Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales”

19). Calling the position “poetry editor” makes Robinson sound

important, but no one working on Southey, to my knowledge, has

ever referred to his work for Stuart in this way.

As it turns out, neither of them was anything like what we think of

a “poetry editor” as being. Admittedly, calling Robinson “poetry edi-

tor” is an innocuous shorthand and is not completely inaccurate. And

it certainly does not depreciate the value of the most significant dis-

cussions of Robinson’s Morning Post period, such as in Judith Pascoe’s

Romantic Theatricality (163–83) or Judith Hawley’s essay “Romantic

Patronage: Mary Robinson and Coleridge Revisited.” Hawley, for

9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1859780230100251_06_ch04.indd 185 12/28/2010 11:08:53 AM12/28/2010 11:08:53 AM

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