The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

12 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

gendered codes for women writers, appearing frequently in reviews of

male poets as well as of female. Many writers proudly advertised their

own works as being elegant. And publishers would make sure the

word elegant appeared in the titles of anthologies: a 1791 collection

of poetry called Extracts, Elegant, Instructive, and Entertaining, in

Poetry; from the Most Approved Authors is a formidable, wide- ranging

two volume collection that includes only a handful of poems by

women poets Barbauld and Ann Yearsley among hundreds of poems

by Spenser, Milton, Pope, Thomson, Gray, Cowper. Another anthol-

ogy entitled The Beauties of Literature, or Elegant Extracts in Prose

(1794) features only male writers such as Plutarch, Cicero, Sterne,

Samuel Johnson, and Swedenborg.

Robinson’s poetry resists the gendered binaries that have become

an unfortunate by- product of the recovery of women writers and that

originally privileged women’s fiction as a “literature of their own.”

But I argue that Robinson herself sees poetry as a masculine genre

and thus plays on (admittedly) essentialized notions of gender and

form in order to transgress them, to compete with men poets, and

to surpass women poets. She understood that working in difficult

poetic forms would distinguish her poetry from that of the “poet-

ess.” As Paula R. Backscheider puts it, “Poetry is devilishly hard to

write—for men and women” (17). Robinson, therefore, shared some

of the sexist assumptions for which we might criticize her male con-

temporaries. Because of this, the study of her poetry requires working

from some basic assumptions about gender and genre. It also requires

the recognition that Robinson participated in what she considered

to be masculine literary traditions that were inherently more chal-

lenging and valuable. This book, therefore, foregrounds the fact that

Robinson consistently and purposively affiliated herself with power-

ful male figures. This may be an uncomfortable truth to some, but

it is true nonetheless. Robinson’s poetry does not sit well in isolation

with her female contemporaries. In British Romanticism, a field so

monolithically dominated by six male poets, the isolation of women’s

writing as separate but equal, as advocated by Isobel Armstrong for

the purposes of recovery, was necessary to liberate their work from

formal and aesthetic ideologies that we now recognize as severely

limiting to the study of writers of both sexes.^13 Two major schol-

arly achievements stand out in my mind as having consummated the

work of understanding women’s poetry on its own terms: Paula R.

Feldman’s British Women Poets of the Romantic Era is the most com-

plete and diverse collection of texts, showing the immense variety of

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

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