The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

10 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

impulse of her genius appears to have been more peculiarly directed:

even in the earliest of her productions, that fertility of imagination,

and correctness of taste, were indicated, which, in her subsequent

compositions, are so eminently displayed. The sweetness and harmony

of her versification has been scarcely equalled, and certainly never

surpassed, by any cotemporary poet: neither, while attending to the

flow and melody of her numbers, has Mrs. Robinson been unmind-

ful of the force and dignity of the sentiment expressed. (Memoirs 2:

175– 6).

While certainly we cannot expect critical objectivity from the friend

charged with the continuation of the unfinished autobiography and

thus with the preservation of Robinson’s fame, these remarks are

not as hyperbolic as they may seem: the “friend” who continues the

Memoirs where Robinson left off, either Maria Elizabeth Robinson

or, as Hester Davenport convincingly suggests, Samuel Jackson

Pratt (Works of Mary Robinson 7: xxi), makes no grand claim for the

profundity or the sophistication of Robinson’s poetry. Indeed, the

emphasis is rightly placed on her stylistic proficiency—“the sweet-

ness and harmony of her versification” and “the f low and melody

of her numbers.” Her skillful metrical practice, as Coleridge also

recognized in appreciating her “ear,” is Robinson’s most significant

literary accomplishment. But it is a talent that remains underappreci-

ated in the recovery of Robinson as a Romantic- period writer, and

has gone largely untreated by anyone except Curran (and myself)

since 1801.

As this book aims to show, such formal considerations ought

to be established as fundamental to the reading of her poetry. The

study of Robinson’s obvious pleasure in crafting extravagant poetic

form ought to be governed by Wimsatt and Beardsley’s maxim

that “it is just as important to observe what meter a poem is writ-

ten in... as it is to observe what language the poem is written in”

(596). More recently, in her study Formal Charges, Wolfson asserts

that, for Romantic- period poetry, “choices of form and the way it

is managed often signify as much as, and as part of, words them-

selves” (3).^12 As I will show, Robinson and her readers were sensi-

tive to such formal choices and the management of them. Robinson,

moreover, was particularly innovative, or at least highly adventurous,

in her formal choices. These innovations set her apart from other late

eighteenth- century poets. Donald Wesling points out that Romantic

poets worked largely in familiar verse forms that were not altogether

different from those of their predecessors, although there was indeed

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

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