The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Introduction 9

Coleridge’s assessment thus provides a teleology for this book,

which examines Robinson’s poetic career in terms of her representa-

tions of herself as a poet and her poetry through form. Robinson’s

poetry has been denied the close reading and formal analysis that

provided the foundations for the study of poets such as Wordsworth

and Coleridge over the past 200 years. Because formal approaches are

not so prevalent as they once were but are still necessary for under-

standing the poetics of the writers who constellate our field of vision

(including, now, Robinson), I feel it is incumbent on me, writing

the first book- length study of her poetry, to draw attention to the

workings of her verse, particularly as it functions intertextually. In

focusing on reading Robinson’s forms, I see her engaging some of

the questions Wolfson has identified as central to “Romantic formal-

ism,” given the reputation the period’s poets traditionally have had as

iconoclasts:

Does [Romantic- period poetry’s] highly formed language compro-

mise its effort to participate in political and social discourse? Or does

this formal difference distinguish, indeed establish, the unique agency

of poetry to address the wider arena of national and cultural self-

ref lection? (“Romanticism” 223)

While my interest is not so much in Romanticism as a general aes-

thetic, I do see Robinson as working “uncertainly” with a similarly

“formalist poetics” as the poets Wolfson examines (“Romanticism”

223). If Wordsworth and Coleridge had, as Hazlitt suggests, a revo-

lutionary poetics, Robinson, a generation older than they were, is

generally more committed to a conservative one, in terms of working

with eighteenth- century forms; but her application of those forms

to her later radical perspective is complicatedly progressive—as the

juxtaposition of Robinson’s politics in chapters two and four will

show.^11

My purpose here is to show her at work and at play in the medium

that I believe she herself most enjoyed—poetry. Although she wrote in

nearly every literary genre and form available to her, Robinson clearly

regarded poetry as her most significant claim to fame. Her daughter

understood this as well; the Memoirs published after Robinson’s death

never delve into her fiction, placing great emphasis on her poetry and

on her metrical skills:

The productions of Mrs. Robinson, both in prose and verse, are

numerous, and of various degrees of merit: but to poetry the native

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