The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 39

ingenious countrywoman far excels all that we know of the works of

the Grecian Sappho. (448)

Most often reiterated in print by her friends, this valuable sobriquet

nonetheless became cultural currency for the rest of the decade,

although some repeated it more or less obliquely in reference to

her adulterous past. As a lyric poet frequently writing about disap-

pointed love, Robinson could not avoid a mild suggestion of sexual-

ity, particularly because this volume reproduced as a frontispiece an

engraving made from one of Reynolds’ portraits of her. But Robinson

clearly employed her Della Cruscan avatars “Laura,” “Laura Maria,”

“Oberon,” and “Julia” as a means of effacing “the celebrated Perdita”

and of transforming “Mrs. Robinson” to “Sappho.” Through this

network Robinson gained access not only to a publisher, with whom

she could attempt to make money, but also entrée to a world of fellow

writers and readers who were already having fun with the poetry of

the World and its avatars.

The Man of Bran

Robinson’s poetry is fundamentally “Della Cruscan.” She herself used

that somewhat ludicrous adjective in her poem “Ode to the Muse,”

an expanded version of the poem “The Muse,” with which she initi-

ated herself into the network. Here, even the Muse herself sings to

a “DELLA CRUSCAN lyre” (1: 430). In his 1797 introduction to The

Baviad and Mæviad (xiii), Gifford rightly finds it to be ridiculous

but, not content to be simply amused, he goes on to attack the Della

Crusca network and its poets for not being serious literature. In this

regard, the figure Gifford attacks is a straw man; or, rather, a man of

bran. Merry, Topham, and others in the network knew very well that

his pseudonym “Della Crusca” was a centuries- old inside joke. In

fact, the original Accademia della Crusca had ostensibly ludic origins:

its name means literally “academy of bran,” deriving from a circle of

friends who playfully joked that they were a “brigata dei crusconi.”^12

For the sixteenth- century Della Cruscans, the name was a bread-

making metaphor for their aim of purifying the Italian language and

of preserving the Florentine poetic diction of Dante, Petrarch, and

Boccaccio. The f lour is good language, the bran is bad. Although they

were serious about their goal, as the publication of their Voc a b o l a r i o

attests, the name is self- deprecating, even burlesque, enough. And

they used avatars as well in this social and cultural network, all of

which pertained to various aspects of the cultivation of grain and

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