The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 41

Because the World f o r 2 9 Ju n e 17 8 7 i s r a r e — I f o u n d i t a t t h e N e w b e r r y

in Chicago—most readers follow the correspondence between Della

Crusca and Anna Matilda as it was reprinted in The Poetry of the

World and The British Album. Originally, however, the pseudonym

was “Del Crusca”; and Anna Matilda’s first poem to him, “The Pen,”

is addressed “to Del Crusca.” Part of the joke here is a reference to

Merry’s past affiliation and to his association with Hester Piozzi,

but I think it is also a sophomoric attempt to jokingly fashion a first

and last name out of the Accademia della Crusca. “Del” sounds thus

more masculine than “Della,” which is, of course, just a preposition

and article. Merry must have corrected Topham, though, because his

next poem to appear in the World (“Elegy, Written after Having Read

The Sorrows of Werter” on 26 July 1787) is signed “Della Crusca.”

Moreover, the reference to Piozzi certainly is a wink to those in the

know—which may not have been such an exclusive group because

poems from the Florence Miscellany, a 1785 anthology of poems by

Merry and his friends, had appeared already in the London press.

This little- known piece of paratextual evidence certainly casts new

light on the supposed mystery of Della Crusca’s identity.

These features of the poem’s original publication would have made

the poem even more intriguing. Merry’s debut, particularly in its

original context, is more playful than the subsequent attacks on the

Della Cruscans gave it credit for being. In their ludic- erotic qualities,

many of Della Crusca’s poems are similar to the tone and intertex-

tual strategies of Ovid’s Amores. As in many of Ovid’s poems, the

speaker’s ambivalence is comic, so the poem is simply organized to

demonstrate the vacillation from one pole, his rejection of love, to the

opposite, the futility of an inveterate cavalier making such an asser-

tion. The paradoxical effect is also, therefore, Petrarchan and thus

also echoes many an Elizabethan sonneteer. It begins, like Ovid’s

Amores, in mock admonishment of Cupid’s mischief: “Go, idle Boy!

I quit thy pow’r; / Thy couch of many a thorn and f low’r.... ” The

poem, moreover, contains the obligatory references to the nightin-

gale, “sweet bird of eve,” a ubiquitous epithet, and to the moon,

“pale- cheek’d Virgin of the Night,” all vestiges of Petrarchism com-

mon to the poetry of Sensibility and likely also references to Smith’s

Elegiac Sonnets, where similar figures appear.

Merry’s “The Adieu and Recall to Love” and Cowley’s response,

“The Pen,” are paired together as the opening of the romance in The

Poetry of the World and in the second collection The British Album

(1789). In sequence, Anna Matilda’s response reads almost like a non

sequitur because it does not respond specifically to the substance of

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

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