The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 31

with the sound of the witches’ incantation. Because of its formal effi-

ciency and satirical clarity, this has become one of Robinson’s most

admired poems since Curran first drew attention to it in “The I

Altered” (191–2). As Jeffrey C. Robinson suggests, “the laying out

of sights and sounds changes confusion into relationships, a swirl of

detail becomes a constellation” (97). One of her best poems, “The

Camp,” unlike most of Robinson’s poems, did not become part of her

canon represented by the 1806 Poetical Works, which was edited by

her daughter, Maria Elizabeth. But it did reappear with a few substan-

tive changes as “Winkfield Plain; or a Description of a Camp in the

Year 1800” in Maria Elizabeth Robinson’s 1804 anthology The Wild

Wreath, published in tribute to her mother.^6 There, it appears signed

not by Oberon but with the initials “M. E. R.” Perhaps a misprint.

However, given the likelihood that the poem’s descriptions could eas-

ily recall the Prince of Wales’ corps at Brighton and thus Robinson’s

past association with him, Maria Elizabeth may have given her own

initials to the poem in an effort to distance her mother from that

unsavory past rather than to claim it as her own work. But then why

reprint the poem at all? Whatever the reason, Robinson’s pseudonym

would not do. As an avatar, Oberon fails as effacement of Robinson’s

authorship even despite the fact that the signature represents a mythi-

cal king of the fairies. Robinson thus does not play Oberon; rather,

Oberon represents Robinson.^7

D u r i ng her tenu re a s St u a r t ’s c h ief p o et ic cor re s p ondent , R obi n s on

revived nearly all of her avatars, most of which I will discuss in the

course of this study. They are all f luid, shifting, finally indeterminate

as representations of anything other than Robinson’s fertile, fervid

poetic ingenuity. This is why I think of them in terms of form rather

than character or persona. In the tributary poems that appear in the

1801 Memoirs and the 1806 Poetical Works, Robinson’s poetic admir-

ers use the avatars interchangeably as allegories for Robinson’s poetic

genius. On a more mundane level, for professional purposes, the

pseudonyms gave the impression of variety—especially in the final

year of her life—and provided her employers with the appearance of

a healthy stable of writers. As the chief contributor of poetry to the

Morning Post, Robinson seems to have thought of her position as

requiring at least the fiction of a vast array of poetic contributors.

As she writes to her friend Pratt, “I continue my daily labours / in

the Post; all the Oberons, Tabithas, MR’s and indeed all most of the

poetry, you see there is mine” (7: 321). This is the way she took

charge of the paper’s poetical department, a subject I will address

in greater depth in chapter four. The principals among Robinson’s

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