18 The Poetry of Mary Robinsonreminder in The Natural Daughter of Laura Maria’s connection to
Della Crusca and Anna Matilda. At the end of her career, Robinson
clearly then wished to rekindle also the popular sensation that helped
her begin it by reminding her readers that newspaper poetry is meant
to be playful and fun, and that she was not ashamed of writing it.
Before it was attacked for being a degenerate “school of poetry,” the
so- called Della Cruscans, those writers who corresponded with Della
Crusca and those who effected the publication of it, created a popular
culture phenomenon but were also a professional network into which
Robinson insinuated herself in order to get her career off the ground.
Literary and professional networking in the London newspapers is
how Robinson begins and ends her career.
While she certainly enjoyed participating in various more or less
private coteries throughout her life, as a poet she pursued the pub-
licity of professional and literary networks, founded on transmission
and proliferation. In this book, I focus on Robinson’s principal forum
for her poetry—the newspaper—but also on the way her poetry net-
works with other texts, paratexts, contexts, and intertexts in that par-
ticular space. Crucial to the idea of the network is the space in which
it exists: originally, for the Della Crusca network, for instance, this is
the newspaper, a kind of textual heterotopia where different actors—
the writers and the poems themselves—cross temporal, textual, and
aesthetic boundaries.^1 This establishment of a public literary network
with a shared ethos requires someone like Bell, who published first
the World and then the Oracle, or like Stuart, who published the
Morning Post; these businessmen had a commercial commitment to
popular taste and the means to facilitate the network and provide a
space for it. Bell is a conduit through which the Della Crusca network
happens, just as Stuart is for the network of writers who worked for
him at the Morning Post. The key to understanding the nature of
this kind of network is the paratextual evidence found in the newspa-
per publication—but not usually reprinted in the book publications.
There are commercial reasons for this, of course. In the newspapers,
poetry served a purpose much in the way the comics section does in
today’s papers; it filled space when needed and provided diversion for
readers. Because, in the paper, the poems are ephemeral and literally
disposable, they ought to be playful, sensational, and, frankly, easy
to read. Every feature of the publication of these poems is meant to
contribute to the facility of appreciation, which also suggests a cor-
responding facility of composition.
Robinson’s newspaper poetry, particularly in the amorous play of
poetic exchange or the social commentary of political satire for public9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 189780230100251_03_ch01.indd 18 12/31/2010 4:20:08 PM12/31/2010 4:20:08 PM
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