[In the following essay, Curran considers Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales for its contemporary significance. Curran looks at her publisher's placement of Robinson alongside Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth as the preeminent poets of the time, and examines the dynamics between these four poets.]

Joseph Cottle concludes the first volume of his Early Recollections with the departure of Wordsworth and Coleridge for the continent following his publication of the first volume of their Lyrical Ballads, an event by which he marked his own retirement from an uncertain vocation:

I for ever quitted the business of a bookseller, with the earnest hope that the time might never arrive when Bristol possessed not a bookseller, prompt to extend a friendly hand to every man of genius, home-born, or exotic, that might be found within its borders.

(Recollections 1: 324-25)

In 1798 Cottle was justifiably proud of his achievement in “becoming the publisher of the first volumes of three such Poets, as Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth,” which he later rightly claimed was “a distinction that might never again occur to a Provincial bookseller” (1: 309). By 1800, secure himself from the necessities of competing in the marketplace from so distant a vantage as Bristol, Cottle through the printing firm of Biggs and Cottle … still retained an active entrepreneurial interest in fostering a new school of poetry (one that would, he hoped, also include himself and his brother Amos among its noted members).

One month before the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems appeared in London, Longman published Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales, which had also issued from the press of Biggs and Cottle. Robinson, like the others in Cottle's “school,” had a close association with Bristol, where she was raised and educated at the Miss Mores's celebrated academy. In 1797 she had enrolled herself among Longman's increasing list of popular novelists, and with the poetic command of Lyrical Tales she was once again demonstrating her literary versatility. In recent years, however, if her volume enters the critical literature on Romanticism at all, it has generally been in a footnote, where it is registered as a minor irritant to the success of Wordsworth's groundbreaking collection of 1800. Apprised that she had boldly usurped his title, Wordsworth that autumn attempted without success to have it changed simply to Poems in Two Volumes, the rubric he resurrected for his next collection in 1807.¹

But it is clear that neither Joseph Cottle nor Thomas Longman saw Robinson's title as a usurpation of Wordsworth's rights; indeed, from the refusal of Longman to accede to Wordsworth's request we may conjecture that this highly successful firm had its eye shrewdly on the marketplace. Longman and Rees obviously had high expectations of Robinson's volume, playing her £63 for a press run of 1,250 copies, which in both categories signifies very respectable numbers.² The collusion of printer and publisher in enlisting titles so nearly identical and in printing them in sizable quantities within a month of each other suggests an effort at public relations and at maximizing the visibility and thus the profitability of what would be construed as poetic collections with similar features. And, indeed, when we place these publishing ventures within the perspective of Cottle's justified pride of two years before in nurturing not just Wordsworth, but Coleridge and Southey too, we should see Mary Robinson's entry into these lists as a determined effort to establish herself firmly in the public mind as one of these associated voices that would carry English verse into a new century. Her earnestness was sustained by the rapid failure of her health and her attendant recognition that Lyrical Tales would be the main conduit for her poetic reputation.³ Between the publication of Lyrical Tales and Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, on 26 December 1800, Mary Robinson, just twelve years Wordsworth's senior and by far the best known of these four poets, died.

To establish the dynamics of the interrelationship of the four poets is to recontextualize the poetry each was writing in this remarkable period of creative rivalry and must by its very nature change the perspective by which Robinson has all but disappeared from view. The interrelationship, it must be stressed, was for Robinson almost wholly literary. Wordsworth never met her, nor, it appears, did Southey, though she succeeded him as Daniel Stuart's chief correspondent to the “Poetical Department” of the Morning Post when he left for Portugal at the end of 1799. Coleridge seems not actually himself to have made Robinson's personal acquaintance until January 1800.⁴ Yet all three of the poets later to be identified as comprising the Lake School had been, through their contributions to the Morning Post, associated with Robinson as early as November 1797, when Robinson and Coleridge were both given contracts by Stuart. By December of that year Tabitha Bramble (Robinson), Albert (Coleridge), and Mortimer (Wordsworth) had all published in Stuart's columns, and in the next month Southey, who favored anonymity in his newspaper publications, joined the group and quickly became its principal member, contributing, as Kenneth Curry has so valuably documented, in the range of two hundred poems before he resigned his position to return to Portugal.⁵ Thereafter Robinson took on this demanding role, producing some ninety poems, among them major components of Lyrical Tales, over the next ten months, when her physical collapse abruptly halted a creative surge that, however necessitated it was by penury, was by any standard remarkable.⁶

This literary record, accented as it has been by presuppositions of value in later scholarly reconstructions, bears scrutiny from a rigorously objective historical perspective. Even before Coleridge entered the London literary world he crossed Mary Robinson's path, at least figuratively. The ninth of his early “Sonnets on Eminent Characters,” a tribute to William Godwin, was published in the Morning Chronicle on 10 January 1795, the same day that its rival for the liberal readership of the metropolis, the Morning Post and Fashionable World, first introduced to its pages the verse of Mary Robinson, writing a sonnet “To Liberty” under the nom de plume of Portia. Another three poems from Portia's pen followed during that month. Well before this time, Robinson had figured in occasional reports of the newspaper—the lead item in the “Fashionable World” column for 4 September 1794 was the information that “Mrs. robinson is with the muses in Berkshire”—and the political tenor of her work had been warmly applauded and defended against adverse criticism:

Mrs. robinson's “Widow” [The Widow, or, a Picture of Modern Times, 1794] is replete with sentiments of Philanthropy for the “Swinish Multitude;” for this reason, it receives the lash of these mercenary stabbers. She, whose writings, two years since, they worshipped even to idolatry, whom they named, “the english sappho!” to whom they applied the line of Horace, “ex egi monumentum aere perrenous! [perennius]” whose Literary Fame would “outlive the Pencil of a Reynolds!” is now the subject of abuse, because her Novel breathes the Spirit of Democracy!! But the source of such Malice is too glaring to be concealed, by the smooth and shallow artifice of pretended Criticism. We hope to see the labours of Genius triumph over the prejudices of contracted minds, and the Freedom of the Press unshackled by the destructive fetters of Hirelings and Sycophants.

(Morning Post, 14 October 1794: 3)

What this passage reveals is how significant a presence Mary Robinson cast in the London literary world of the early 1790s, as poet, novelist, and outspoken liberal. The subtitle of The Widow links her novel with the political fiction of Robert Bage (Man As He Is, 1792) and William Godwin (Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 1794).⁷ Although Robinson certainly capitalized on her public association with Sappho, using the name as a pseudonym in the columns of the Morning Post and even writing a sonnet sequence à clef on being deserted by Banastre Tarleton, Sappho and Phaon (1796), this account explicitly traces the source of her sobriquet to reviews of her 1791 collection of Poems in which Reynolds's celebrated portrait served as frontispiece.⁸ Robinson was the first of Daniel Stuart's poetical correspondents to be hired, then, because she was the best known. Coleridge and Southey, who had both published their initial original volumes in 1796, were young literary men on the rise, and Wordsworth, though he had made his debut three years before them, was simply not yet a name to conjure with. It may be true that Stuart treated Coleridge with utmost deference to his talent, as David Erdman has argued,⁹ but that respect cannot compare with the puffery Mary Robinson could constantly expect in return for adorning his “Poetical Department” with the productions of her pen.

Certainly it was highly flattering for Robinson to find herself linked with this group of young, talented poets. It must have seemed a far cry from the days early in the decade when she played Laura Maria as one of the countless female admirers of Della Crusca (Robert Merry) in The Oracle and The World. Now it is Wordsworth who writes “Alcaeus to Sappho” and who models “The Solitude of Binnorie” after the metrical effects of Robinson's “Haunted Beach” and allows it to appear in the Morning Post on 14 October 1800 (this less than two weeks after his inquiry about altering the title of his collection) with an uncharacteristically gallant tribute, acknowledging “that the invention of a meter has so widely diffused the name of Sappho, and almost constitutes the present celebrity of Alcaeus.” Wordsworth came by his model through Coleridge's reading Robinson's poem in the Morning Post for 26 February 1800 (a version in which the sixth stanza is wanting) and suggesting that Southey include it in the Annual Anthology for 1800: “the Metre—ay! that Woman has an Ear” (Collected Letters 2: 576).¹⁰ Although it was doubtless Coleridge, intermittently in London during this period, who was the catalyst for Robinson's sense of being accepted as an equal among the rising school of poets, their deference to her manifests much more than mere gentility. On the one hand, as Coleridge's remark intimates, however critical he could be of the unevenness of Robinson's achievement, he had great respect for her craft. And on the other hand, these rising stars, we tend too often to forget, were as yet unregarded in the heavens. It was not until the publication of the enlarged edition of Lyrical Ballads and of Thalaba early in 1801 that the accomplishment of the three young men could be singled out for a composite review that first identified them as comprising a school. Yet it can never be overemphasized how significant it was that Francis Jeffrey's famous attack in the first number of the Edinburgh Review was directed at Robert Southey, for it was he, and not Wordsworth or Coleridge, who by 1802 could be identified as the most prolific and most prominent of the group. Two years before, as a “group” with shared interests, the shared patronage of Daniel Stuart, and a shared printer and publisher, their most prominent member was clearly Mary Robinson.

To recontextualize the actual historical situation out of which came Robinson's Lyrical Tales, then, is to recontextualize that of the Lyrical Ballads as well. This does not mean that we need once more rehearse the dynamic and somewhat tense relations between Coleridge and Wordsworth, nor to place the second edition of that work within the ambience of Wordsworth's ongoing autobiographical reconstruction of his life. These critical operations have been so well done by others as to have erected preliminary commonplaces that seem to block from view other, and in their time more crucial, matters. First, as Jeffrey implicitly recognized, the poetic kinship and rivalry at issue are not simply those between Wordsworth and Coleridge, but those involving the two of them and Southey. And initially, just to be certain that the obvious pattern is underscored, what drove Robinson in the direction of her own competition with Wordsworth's title was her own rivalry at the Morning Post—not with Coleridge, who came to that conduit for his poetry only infrequently, but with Southey. Southey had derisively dismissed his friends' Lyrical Ballads in the Critical Review of October 1798 shortly after their departure for Germany and in his extensive productions during 1797-99 seemed bent on establishing himself in public as undisputed leader of the new school of simple, unadorned, and vernacular poetry. In the Morning Post he largely set the patterns Mary Robinson reconstituted in her twenty-one poetic insertions during 1799 and her ninety or so after taking his place in 1800.¹¹ Only after Wordsworth and Coleridge returned to England and achieved a reconciliation with Southey was their weight reestablished in the exchange; it was only really at the point when Southey himself was preparing his remove to Portugal in the early months of 1800 that the relationship between Coleridge and Robinson developed its full direction. So, though Lyrical Tales may seem in its title to direct its intertextual energies directly at Wordsworth, in subject matter and in style (particularly as seen in the flattened blank verse bordering on prose in which Robinson is more dextrous than Southey), often her interlocutor is Southey. But since he and Wordsworth are themselves so markedly in competition, which would explain his generally adverse review of Lyrical Ballads, the threads of influence, extension, and reconception become tangled indeed and require some sorting before we can measure Robinson's relation to them.

The pertinent texts among Southey's early poems are the six “English Eclogues” he described in prefatory remarks as bearing “no resemblance to any poems in our language”—“The Old Mansion House,” “The Grandmother's Tale,” “The Funeral” (“Hannah”), “The Sailor's Mother,” “The Witch,” “The Ruined Cottage”—published as a set in the second volume he added to his Poems in 1799, along with their counterparts in the Annual Anthology of 1799 (“Eclogue. The Last of the Family”) and that of 1800 (“Eclogue. The Wedding”). Robert Mayo long ago noted the similarity of subject matter between “Hannah,” Southey's blank verse description of the wasting away of an unwed mother, and “The Thorn” (“Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads” 496-97). Southey's poem was written at Burton in Hampshire, where he lived from mid-June to early September of 1797, and first published in the Monthly Magazine for 4 October 1797. In the winter he was in London, where he first met Dorothy Wordsworth and probably renewed the acquaintance with her brother developed in Bristol in 1795, then in the spring moved first to Bath and then back to Bristol. Although Coleridge reports constant conversations with Wordsworth about Southey (Letters 1: 525), there appears to have been no further contact between them at this point (their actual intimacy was delayed until October 1803). If Wordsworth was influenced by Southey's poem five months later in writing “The Thorn” (19 March 1798), we can only speculate that it was through the interest Coleridge—sometimes against his will—took in the career of his brother-in-law. In the case of “Hannah,” the inference is inescapable, since Coleridge wrote Southey a glowing tribute to his poem on 15 September 1797 (Letters 1: 345-46), a period when he was in daily intercourse with Wordsworth. The supposition of Coleridge's mediation is strengthened by the presence of “The Ruined Cottage” among Southey's “English Eclogues.” Although the plot is different from that of Wordsworth's poem—it concerns a mother's dissolution after the seduction of her lone daughter—the general theme of female betrayal and decline and a narrative frame through which the tale is imparted by an older man to an inexperienced male friend are sufficiently alike that it is scarcely possible to believe that the two poems were written in total independence one from the other. There are likewise similarities between Wordsworth's “Old Man Travelling”—to “take a last leave of my son, a mariner / Who from a sea-flight has been brought to Falmouth / And there is dying in an hospital”—and “The Sailor's Mother,” where Southey adapts Wordsworth's technique of contradictory perspectives to a similar encounter, and between “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” and Southey's “Grandmother's Tale” of “blear-eyed Moll,” murdered by a smuggler whose conscience subsequently torments him to the point that he confesses and is hanged. When Southey's “English Eclogues” arise in the critical literature (an infrequent phenomenon, to be sure), they are by the inner logic of canonical evaluation placed as foils to Wordsworth's greater achievement.¹² But what is diminished or simply ignored in the process is the extent to which Southey is engaged, and (if we credit the influence of “Hannah” on “The Thorn”) perhaps Wordsworth too, in a complex revisionary act whose central stake is the nature of the new realism that will impel English poetry into the nineteenth century.¹³

Mary Robinson is as deeply committed to this effort as were the two men who formed the “Lake School.” But before we turn to her distinctive viewpoint, the juxtaposition of “English Eclogues” and Lyrical Ballads allows us to perceive that Southey has a genuinely different recognition of the exigencies of “real life” in rural England than does Wordsworth. His poems are of a piece in mode and style, genuine slices of quotidian provincial life written in the vernacular of everyday speech. Everywhere he emphasizes deep-rooted social codes that are conservative and constraining. Among his rural folk superstition and bigotry are rife, and scapegoating, as in “The Witch,” is openly tolerated, not simply, as in “The Thorn,” a subtly implicit process. Economic hardship is ubiquitous and visited disproportionately upon women: the experienced woman observer of “The Wedding” frequently wishes her children in their coffins. Past stabilities are crumbling, whether through the normal process of death, as in “The Old Mansion House” and “The Last of the Family,” or through the more sinister brutalities of seduction (“The Ruined Cottage”) and war (“The Sailor's Mother”). Southey, who is England's most politically outspoken radical poet throughout the 1790s, represents rural society through a perspective that, however disguised so as to retain its universal appeal, is fundamentally political. He employs the dialogue conventional to the eclogue with a shrewd awareness of its ideological propensities: each of his poems embodies an implicit class conflict in its voices. Indeed, this is Southey's shrewd contribution to the English pastoral and of signal historical importance in its modernization during this decade.¹⁴ And yet, whether from prudence or from the instinctive conservatism that is allied with his kind of populism and that would only be fully manifested some fifteen years later when he became poet laureate, Southey brings each of his eclogues to a liberal closure. The class conflict is contained through compromise or accommodation: all social forces in the “English Eclogues” can unite behind a single, progressive vision of a common nationhood. That such a pretense from a representative of bourgeois privilege has by now in Britain a long history of exacerbating the class conflicts it wishes away is true enough, but such an awareness should not detract from our recognition that Southey's is actually the first collection of modern English verse to center its focus deliberately on the divergent perspectives conditioned by social roles. From the kind of materialist theoretical perspectives that has in recent years gained a considerable following, Southey has a much more fully developed sense of cultural conditioning than Wordsworth and is far more willing to look hard reality in the eye without idealizations. And even as one may regret the facile liberalism by which he achieves closure, one recognizes that in large measure it mirrors the actual temper of his times and the practice of his culture.

In general contrast to this conception of cultural formation Wordsworth tends to focus on the values and painful losses experienced through the radical contingency of all mental perspective. With both poets of the original Lyrical Ballads, even where the subject is wrapped, at first, in the trappings of the Gothic (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) or, at last, in those of the grand style (“Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”), the project is to deflate these issues to a common level of awareness so as to reveal the complex patterns of feeling and mental activity, the lyrical, that are involved in the mundane doings, the ballads, of daily life. With some stretching by the reader, semblances of Southey's cultural awareness can seem to impinge on these explorations of consciousness: there appear to be economic contingencies lurking behind the sorrows of “The Last of the Flock,” an awareness of being doomed by gender in “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,” a sense of the deprivations of the current war with France implicit in “The Female Vagrant.” But if the signs of destitution and alienation are everywhere, they are generally controlled: Goody Blake is distanced by being made the subject of a story, as is Martha Ray, the little girl amid the family tombstones, and even, for that matter, the Ancient Mariner. Whether or not the poets are consciously involved in suppressing the public realm in which their characters and their selves move, or simply programmatically choose to accentuate mental phenomena, has been a recent matter of debate, which has been salutary even if confined too closely to the two collaborators themselves. What Southey and after him Robinson provide in their creative rivalry with each other and with the poets of Lyrical Ballads is a contemporary repositioning and enlarging of the focus.

Southey narrows his concerns, sacrificing range of subject matter for authenticity of cultural representation. His eclogues are studied in their contemporaneity and their “Englishness”: there are no hermits in his harbors or his woods, no emigrés forsaking the old world or natives forsaken in the new. On the other hand, his eye for detail and ear for plain speech allow him a sure reach for comic effect in “The Grandmother's Tale” and “The Witch” that most readers would deny to Wordsworth's “Idiot Boy.” His class and generational dialogism allows a superimposition of cultural preconceptions, though, it could be argued, in such a schematic way as to offer little capacity for nuance or true human variety among them. Yet if his realism, like that of George Crabbe, lies mainly on the surface, in a culture that knew remarkably little about what was to become characterized in the ensuing century as the “condition of England,” an accurate representation of that surface was surely a value. And a sense that the inner life below that surface had a political and economic component was one that would become increasingly central in nineteenth-century thought. Southey's counter to Wordsworth, then, is one of plain, unmystified, and unapologetic materialism.

Paradoxically, though Robinson is the one of these writers in the throes of poverty and holding herself above destitution by the strength of her pen alone, she eschews Southey's economic realism. (Perhaps, of course, she does so because it is an everyday threat.) Nor does she ever adopt Southey's mode of dialogue. Yet her range of voice and situation seems deliberately broadened beyond that of either Lyrical Ballads or the “English Eclogues,” and the precariousness of her existence seems to have invested her poems with a more urgent sense than even they convey of the stark contingency of human desire. The larger paradox, and what gives Lyrical Tales its claims to a much more serious consideration than was accorded it in its own day or is manifest by its present neglect, is the way in which its abundance of voices, modes of representation, and fertile creativity collide with its sense of a continual thwarting of potentiality to accomplish a thematic tension between means and ends, past and future, consummation and consumption characteristic of the greatest Romantic poetry, and in particular of Wordsworth in a poem like “Tintern Abbey.”

Mary Robinson's habits of publication may have encouraged an opening up of perspective beyond that of her younger associates. Unlike Southey, in writing for the Morning Post she employed a variety of pseudonyms, some ten alone occurring in the output of her last year.¹⁵ She clearly had elaborated at least some of these into the character of personae. Sappho and Lesbia write amorous verse; Sappho generally the victim of her experiences with men, Lesbia with her illusions of happiness still intact. There are a rakish male voice represented by her Oberon and a witty middle-aged Scottish spinster derived from Smollett who, along with Coleridge, debuted as Tabitha Bramble in the “Poetical Department” of December 1797. This figure is of considerable importance to Lyrical Tales, for six of the poems, all humorous and most linked by a sexual thematics, were published under her signature during the first half of 1800.¹⁶ The questions that a few of these poems—“Deborah's Parrot, a Village Tale” and “The Granny Grey, a Love Tale”—raise about the propriety of so pronounced a feminist voice targeting sex-starved old maids and subjecting them to male discipline are obviated when the poems are read in their original position, through the perspective of a gossipy and somewhat malicious spinster who is an inveterate telltale. Needless to say, such a voice—and the rich vein of wit that supports it—is essentially foreign to the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, whose grandmother tells the tale of “blear-eyed Moll” without asserting any personality traits of her own.

As Robinson expands the range of voices to be accommodated by a deflated, interiorized poetic, she also opens up its metrical possibilities. Generally eschewing simple ballad meter or the vernacular forms favored by Southey, Lyrical Tales is notable for its virtuoso employment of stanzaic and sonic patterns. Coleridge's excitement over the “fascinating Metre” of “The Haunted Beach” (Letters 2: 575) and his (or Wordsworth's) public tribute to its invention accentuate how high are Robinson's claims as a practitioner of her craft. The opening stanzas of the poem immediately establish the eerily haunting effects created by a combination of rhyme, meter, and repetition:

Upon a lonely desart Beach
          Where the white foam was scatter'd,
A little shed uprear'd its head
          Though lofty Barks were shatter'd.
The Sea-weeds gath'ring near the door,
          A sombre path display'd;
And, all around, the deaf'ning roar,
Re-echo'd on the chalky shore,
          By the green billows made.
Above, a jutting cliff was seen
          Where Sea Birds hover'd, craving;
And all around, the craggs were bound
          With weeds—for ever waving.
And here and there, a cavern wide
          Its shad'wy jaws display'd;
And near the sands, at ebb of tide,
A shiver'd mast was seen to ride
          Where the green billows stray'd.

There is not a little here of the pyrotechnic skill of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which is probably what attracted Coleridge in the first place. But the uncanny way in which subject and technical treatment reinforce each other—the liberating effect of the feminine rhymes of lines 2 and 4 being broken by the reiterated rhyme of lines 5, 7, and 8 and bound down by the incantatory repetition of the last line reflects the fisherman's obsession with the man he murdered—surpass the capacity of Coleridge's ballad meter, however brilliantly employed, to assume complementary meaning. A similar precision with contrasting masculine and feminine rhymes informs “The Poor, Singing Dame,” while in a different timbre a half-refrain at the end of each stanza reinforces the comic effect of “The Trumpeter, an Old English Tale.” A fluid combination of short and long lines is used to similar effect in “Old Barnard, a Monkish Tale,” whereas the intrusion of pentameter, then hexameter lines to brake the end of each stanza in “The Negroe Girl” attenuates the agony she experiences in watching the wreck of the slave ship that carries her lover. Against this effortless display of technical facility, Robinson occasionally intrudes the strong measure of her distinctive blank verse. It bears neither the grand tonalities of Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” nor the conversational ease of Coleridge's “Nightingale,” nor the flat plainness of Southey's “Ruined Cottage.” Although closest in style to Southey, its tones are rhetorically compressed, its sonic patterns accentuated, its colors enriched. Thus in “The Widow's Home” we hear a distinctive fourth voice rehearse the familiar integration of child with nature that is a burden of the poems just cited from their collections, as the soldier's son awaits his father's return:

                                                                                                                        On the hills
He watches the wide waste of wavy green
Tissued with orient lustre, till his eyes
Ache with the dazzling splendour, and the main,
Rolling and blazing, seems a second Sun!
And, if a distant whitening sail appears,
Skimming the bright horizon while the mast
Is canopied with clouds of dappled gold,
He homeward hastes rejoicing. An old Tree
Is his lone watch-tow'r; 'tis a blasted Oak
Which, from a vagrant Acorn, ages past,
Sprang up, to triumph like a Savage bold
Braving the Season's warfare. There he sits
Silent and musing the long Evening hour,
Till the short reign of Sunny splendour fades
At the cold touch of twilight. Oft he sings;
Or from his oaten pipe, untiring pours
The tune mellifluous which his father sung.
When he could only listen.

As unassuming as is Robinson's expansion of metrical possibility in this volume, extraordinary claims could be made for the effects it presages, if not directly impels. Among the thousands of volumes of verse published in the eighteenth century, there are probably no more than a handful like hers. Except for the four pieces in deflated blank verse, all the poems of Lyrical Tales are constructed differently; most are unpretentiously masterful in their metrical effect. That this volume appears in the last month of the eighteenth century foreshadows the concern with technical inventiveness that characterizes much nineteenth-century verse in English. Unquestionably, its impetus within the century came from the women writers we group under the rubric of poetesses, figures like Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett. Their common source, acknowledged or not, is Mary Robinson.

Within the more limited context pursued here, which are the poetic positions being staked out by her younger associates, Robinson tends to be more inclusive, less constrained by conceptual homogeneity, than they are generally considered to be. Perhaps, however, if instead of just the “English Eclogues” we were to read as counterweight Southey's entire second volume of 1799, with its long “Vision of the Maid of Orleans” and its many gothic ballads, we would be less conscious of a determining ideological purpose; or, if we paid as much attention to the four poems Wordsworth earlier styled as Lines (as in “Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening”) as we do to “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” we might see the original Lyrical Ballads as more miscellany than monument. Robinson, at any rate, through range of historical period and culture as through metrical variety, exemplifies the heterogeneity we sense in the fact that nine of her poems bear subtitles distinguishing the particular sort of “tale” each purports to be. Although the tale teller and the narrative process never intrude self-reflexively on the text as they do in Lyrical Ballads, Robinson shares Wordsworth's attention to the sensibility of the central figures and psychological reverberations within the tale. Less concerned than Southey with specific cultural formations or pressures, she is much more attuned than he to endemic injustice and abuse of power. If Wordsworth sees in marginality an arena forcing into play a range of mental reactions from fear to compassion, and Southey finds it an aberrancy prompting a dialectical counter-movement toward community, Robinson, herself a deeply victimized woman, views it as the normal condition of life, stressing either the anarchic or the existential, depending on the timbre of her tale.

Although the seven years of war with France only intrude on Lyrical Ballads in the oblique last lines of Wordsworth's “Old Man Travelling” and on the “English Eclogues” in the anathema against French cruelty of Southey's “Sailor's Mother,” Robinson's “Edmund's Wedding” in its multiple ironies is weighted against warfare as a violation of domestic stability. The conscript Edmund returns to his village to find his betrothed Agnes dead from a broken heart; mourning on her grave, he is arrested by his former comrades as a deserter and condemned to be shot. So reduced to the essentials of its plot, the poem may seem simply to reach for any pathos it can grasp; but in its unfolding “Edmund's Wedding” surpasses the raw materials of its construction, revealing beneath patriotic catchwords an essential dehumanization. The agents of cruelty are not the French but the British soldiers who attack the very fabric of English village life. Likewise, in her “Deserted Cottage,” though it seems highly unlikely that she could have known Wordsworth's manuscript poem, Robinson reverts to the war as first cause in the decline and disappearance of a family. If Robinson were reacting only to Southey's poem, her replacement of seduction by conscription asserts the common sense of the already seduced, that behind any individual abuse of masculine power lies the political system that authorizes it. Robinson had suffered it straight from the top, in the Prince of Wales and his father George III, who with impunity if with different motives left her life in ruins.

The common theme of Robinson's pathetic poetry is a sudden and total displacement of the stabilities on which existences depend. The revolutionary and counterrevolutionary warfare of Europe stands behind fully seven of these twenty-two poems—in its domestic shatterings (“Edmund's Wedding,” “The Deserted Cottage,” “The Widow's Home”), in its inescapability (“The Hermit of Mont-Blanc”), in the flotsam of displaced people it leaves in its wake (“The Fugitive,” “Poor Marguerite,” “The Alien Boy”). It is a metaphor for the grotesque patterns by which society reduces the vulnerable to the status of victims, particularly, as already noted, conscripts to war, persons of color (“The Negroe Girl” and the east Indian “Lascar,” a remarkable indictment of imperial racism), children (“The Alien Boy” and the unfathomably other boy in the opening poem, “All Alone”), animals (“The Shepherd's Dog”), the old (“The Deserted Cottage”), and (as exemplified in “The Poor, Singing Dame” and “Poor Marguerite”), of course, women. This is a sad world, one that witnesses constant abuses of power, where armies do no one any good, where class conflict is systemic and cannot be wished away by liberal compromise, and where not perspectivism but insanity and stark alienation seem the logical end of interiorizing social conditions. However constant and pressing the pathos in Lyrical Tales, the extremity of the depiction make it seem a just response to the tears of real things.

There are in Robinson's volume two other responses that indicate she is deliberately reacting to the models set before her by Southey and Wordsworth. The opening poem, “All Alone,” is an ingenious recombination and redirection of “We Are Seven” and “The Thorn,” perhaps with a glance at “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as well. A well-intentioned member of the community, presumptively maternal, confronts a boy who, like Martha Ray as the retired captain of “The Thorn” constructs her story, spends his days by a grave, attempting to reintegrate the child within fostering social bonds. The genuine kindness of the adult and the visible presence of other children happily playing at rustic sports set the stage for a sentimental reconciliation. Instead, the boy tells his interlocutor of how one by one all of the beings who connected him to life died until he was left alone, attached only to the dead, fetishizing his mother's grave. “The Alien Boy” toward the end of the volume pictures a similar being who at least has mental alienation to distance him from the collapse of supporting structures, but the orphan of “All Alone,” like Wordsworth's young girl of “We Are Seven,” is soberly rational. In immediate contrast with Robinson's portrayal, however, Wordsworth's elaboration of the saving continuities of memory perhaps seems facile. The unaccommodated child who stands at the gateway to Lyrical Tales is a totally existential figure, simply and irremediably cut off. If the society pictured in the later tales of the volume is generally antipathetic to life, the calm embrace of entropy in “All Alone,” however it may be thought to figure Robinson's reaction to her own physical decline,¹⁷ testifies to a strength of will still residing within the power of every individual. If it can at last only be expressed in refusal, still, as Byron would later insinuate, refusal is its own mark of value, an assertion of the self where there is nothing left to gain.

But there is a second and far more positive assertion of self that marks this volume and Robinson's response to her male associates. These are the comic tales interspersed with the pathetic poems, often taking similar themes and resolutely laughing away their pathetic import. They are for the most part not nice poems; their general theme is to keep your eyes open, stand up for yourself, and get your just deserts without worrying about the consequences for those who stand in the way. For a highly talented woman who, however else she succeeded, spent her adult existence barely able to manage her equilibrium where men held reins of control, they must have been tonic to write. In an age when sexuality was driven underground by evangelical piety and military duty, poems like “The Mistletoe,” “The Fortune Teller,” and “The Confessor,” emit an earthy air that Robinson can breathe freely and of which there is scarcely a hint in either Southey or Wordsworth. Even where a modern reader draws back from what appear to be implicit reaffirmations of male prerogative, the issue to Robinson is female sexual repression, an internalized male control she refused, to her social disgrace and dishonor, to accommodate.

Mary Robinson lived on a fringe that neither Southey nor Wordsworth ever experienced. She observes the outcast and the marginal from a participant's standpoint. Her poverty and her collapsing health in 1800 immerse her in an existential limbo, only exacerbated by the incessant demands on her pen. For the leisure of Southey's constant relocation to avoid his law books or Wordsworth's rural vagrancy in search of subjects, she had her physical paralysis and the wolf at the door. One result is poems of grotesque, even extreme alienation, as the initially marginalized are cut away from whatever moorings are still at their disposal. Its complement are poems of refusal, and principal among them are those that originated in the voice of her sharp-tongued spinster Tabitha Bramble. T. B. in her unreprinted verse in the Morning Post of 21 August 1800 called “Domestic Beverage” begins by citing the value of “A little acid, now and then.” Under the influence of this sobriquet Robinson considerably enlarges the notion of what constitutes the “lyrical,” so that sexuality is assimilated to the psychological components from which Southey and Wordsworth (though not Coleridge) have unnaturally severed it and the comic mitigates the insistent claims of pathos. In Robinson's depiction of rural England resides a resilient life-force that refuses to be victimized. Its counterpart in the Windsor cottage in which she spent her last months is the technical accomplishment and forceful creativity by which she staved off the inevitable to the very end. Lyrical Tales is a testament to an indomitable spirit who demanded her place in the creation of what we now call English Romanticism.

Notes

1. Dorothy writes to Mrs. John Marshall (10-12 September 1800) that “he intends to give them the title of ‘Poems by W. Wordsworth’ as Mrs. Robinson has claimed the title and is about publishing a volume of Lyrical Tales. This is a great objection to the former title, particularly as they are both printed at the same press and Longman is the publisher of both the works” (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805 297). By early October Wordsworth informed both publisher and printer of his wishes (303-4), but without effect.

2. For this information I am indebted to the meticulous research in publishers' archives conducted by Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820.” Cottle paid Wordsworth 30 guineas for a run of 500 copies of the original Lyrical Ballads (Recollections 2: 23); for the 1800 imprint Wordsworth secured £80 for two anticipated editions, consisting of 750 (volume 1) and 1000 (volume 2) for the first and 1000 copies each for the second (Letters, The Early Years 310).

3. Robinson's concern for the successful reception of her volume is evident in a letter she wrote to S. J. Pratt on 31 August 1800: see Kenneth Neill Cameron, ed., Shelley and His Circle 1: 232.

4. Martin J. Levy supplies the relevant biographical documentation in “Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and Kubla Khan.” For further information on the relations of the two poets, see David V. Erdman, “Lost Poem Found: The Cooperative Pursuit and Recapture of an Escaped Coleridge Sonnet of 72 Lines” [Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 65 (1961), 249-268].

5. See The Contributions of Robert Southey to the Morning Post, ed. Kenneth Curry. For the record of Coleridge and Wordsworth's contributions to this and other newspapers, consult Appendix D (3: 285-311) to Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ed. David V. Erdman.

6. In her letter to Pratt of 31 August 1800, Robinson acknowledged, “I continue my daily labours in the Post; all the Oberons. Tabithas. M R's and indeed most of the Poetry, you see there is mine” (Cameron, ed., Shelley and His Circle 1: 232).

7. Kenneth Neill Cameron attributes Godwin's interest in Mary Robinson not just to her being beautiful and “celebrated,” but, as evidenced by her long poem “The Progress of Liberty,” “also because her social philosophy was similar to his own” (Shelley and His Circle 1: 235). Robinson was intimately acquainted with Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays as well. Godwin and John Wolcot (Peter Pindar) were the only associates to attend her funeral in Windsor on 31 December 1800.

8. This portrait is now in the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London, which has published a monograph by John Ingamells, Mrs Robinson and Her Portraits (1978), concluding with a checklist of twenty-three portraits of her.

9. See Essays on His Times I: lxxii-lxxiv, where Erdman marginalizes Robinson's significance in his effort to underscore that of Coleridge.

10. Erdman suggests that Coleridge rather than Wordsworth wrote the commendation that prefaced “Alcaeus to Sappho” as a component of this later “newspaper flirtation” (Essays on His Times 3: 291).

11. To pursue this subject fully would require a comparative treatment of Southey's reconstituted further editions of the two-volume Poems, his two volumes of the Annual Anthology, and his Metrical Tales and Other Poems of 1805, along with the run of Robinson's contributions to the Morning Post, which have never been gathered, as well as her last volume. Indeed, it could well be that, even as Lyrical Tales refers to Wordsworth's volume, so Southey's Metrical Tales is meant to invoke Robinson's. Such an extended analysis, though valuable for sorting out the incremental nature of poetic fashion and influence, is manifestly beyond the scope of the present essay.

12. See, for instance, Steven Maxfield Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads 116-19, a scholarly and critical pillar of our knowledge of these works. In all fairness, it is perhaps only natural to observe Southey's own defensiveness about his originality turned against him.

13. For contexts of this “realism,” consult Robert Mayo, “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads”; Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798); and Betty T. Bennett, ed., British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism.

14. To place this within a larger context, consult Chap. 5, “The Pastoral,” in Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 2nd ed. 85-127; also Lore Metzger, One Foot in Eden: English Pastoral Poetry.

15. These are Laura, Laura Maria, Lesbia, M. R., Oberon, Sappho, the Sylphid (in prose), T. B., Tabitha Bramble, and Titania.

16. The sequence is “Mistress Gurton's Cat. A Domestic Tale” (No. 9774, 8 January), “Old Barnard.—A Monkish Tale” (No. 9791, 28 January), “The Tell Tale; or, Deborah's Parrot” (No. 9821, 4 March), “The Confessor. A Tale” (No. 9835, 20 March), “The Fortune Teller” (No. 9855, 12 April), “The Granny Grey.—A Tale” (No. 9906, 10 June). Five other poems later revised and included in Lyrical Tales, all serious in tone, were published over the name of Mrs. Robinson. These are “The Poor Singing Dame” (No. 9789, 25 January), “The Haunted Beach” (No. 9816, 26 February), “Agnes” [retitled “Edmund's Wedding”] (No. 9818, 28 February), “The Deserted Cottage” (No. 9829, 13 March), “Poor Marguerite” (No. 9851, 8 April). In all, half the 22 poems of Lyrical Tales were published, most in shorter versions, in the Morning Post.

17. Stuart published “All Alone” in the Morning Post of 18 December 1800 to note Robinson's “just published” volume: it was thus the last poem printed during her lifetime. With it one might compare “The Savage of Aveyron,” another portrait of existential childhood and a brilliant technical accomplishment.