The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates II 71

Moreover, Robinson designed her Laura Maria avatar specifically for

the interests of Bell’s paper, and for the refined literary elegance that

characterized his printing innovations and his book publications. The

Laura Maria avatar is also a brand directed toward an upscale liberal

audience of West End consumers. From its inception, the avatar pro-

moted Robinson’s poetry by attracting readers who would eventually

become subscribers for her debut volume. As Laura Maria, Robinson’s

characteristic lyric extravagance is refined to a baroque elegance that

showcases Robinson’s formal versatility and discipline, as well as her

aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual credentials, or, some might say,

pretensions.

The Laura Maria avatar, then, makes a claim to cultural legitimacy,

encompassing both the Petrarchan Laura revived figuratively as the self-

laureled poet, as well as the authorial Maria idealized, de- eroticized,

and recontextualized. Of all of Robinson’s avatars, Laura Maria is also

the most formally ostentatious. Given his eye for design, Bell surely

considered Laura Maria’s poems to be ornamental as well. Robinson’s

penchant for writing irregular and allegorical odes—with varying line-

and stanza- lengths—provided Bell with opportunities for elaborate

printing features, such as conspicuous indentions to emphasize rhymes

that may be several lines apart or centering stanzas containing lines

of varying lengths, plus a particularly bewildering array of italics and

small capitals. The italics and small capitals are frequently inscrutable

because they do not necessarily represent elocutionary emphases so

much as they represent the excitement or stimulation the poem offers

to the reader. These features are textual but not verbal, if not also a bit

gimmicky, and are designed to make the poems visually interesting on

the page. Bell meant for the textual representation of the poem’s for-

mal qualities to catch the eye, to “pop” off of the page. These formal

features, both in the printing and the poetics, contributed to the recep-

tion of the poetry and the ubiquitous adjective elegant that appears so

often in contemporary assessments of Robinson’s poetry and in nearly

every review of her first volume, published by Bell.

This formal elegance is not just superficial ornamentation. For

Robinson style is substance, especially in the early years of her poetic

career. Laura Maria performs elegance through the demonstrations of

metrical virtuosity and poetic fancy; the poems are intended to sug-

gest formal polish and refinement, and a pleasing ingenuity both of

metrical variation and surprising imagery.^5 Laura Maria looks past

Della Crusca to William Collins and Joseph Warton. Warton’s “Ode

to Fancy” in particular is practically a poetic manifesto for Robinson’s

Laura Maria avatar. With its concluding prayer that personified Fancy

9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 719780230100251_04_ch02.indd 71 12/28/2010 11:08:27 AM12/28/2010 11:08:27 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