The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

14 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

the political atmosphere of the early 1790s. Here, Robinson becomes

involved in the careful construction of her Laura Maria pseudonym,

first as an avatar of baroque elegance for the branding of Bell’s pub-

lications, then as an avatar of complicated political ambivalence by

which she manages to avoid the ignominious fate of Della Crusca.

Chapter three examines the way Robinson negotiates her new iden-

tity as “the English Sappho” as a means of distancing herself from

the “Perdita” epithet by laying claim to that mantle with her sonnet

sequence Sappho and Phaon, which, as I will show, involves a kind of

privileging of masculine traditions established by Ovid and Petrarch

over the feminine lyric tradition associated with the original Sappho.

Chapter four has Robinson returning to the newspaper business hav-

ing emerged from an intertextual past back to her present, returning

to newsprint with more politically oppositional avatars such as Portia

and Tabitha Bramble. In chapter four, I examine Robinson’s partici-

pation in a new professional network at the Morning Post that includes

Coleridge and Southey. My final chapter considers her new interest in

narrative poetry and the composition of new meters, original stanzas,

or nonce forms through the lens of Coleridge’s perspective on her

work. The book concludes with a close reading of Robinson’s poetic

response to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” that uncovers the affinities

in their poetic correspondence with Robinson’s original association

with Della Crusca. Indeed, as I will show, Robinson’s poetic career

is framed by associations with Robert Merry and with Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, and with many other literary, intertextual, and profes-

sional assignations in between.

9780230100251_02_int.indd 149780230100251_02_int.indd 14 12/28/2010 11:08:09 AM12/28/2010 11:08:09 AM

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

Cop

yright material fr

om www

.palgra

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

sitetsbib

lioteket i

Tr

omso - P

algra

veConnect - 2011-04-13