This article takes its point of departure from Judith Pascoe's contemplation of Mary Robinson's elaborate and continual self-presentation in Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship.¹ Denied her career as an actress after becoming the Prince of Wales's mistress, she simply moved to a more encompassing stage, turning the streets of London's West End and the carriageways of Hyde Park into a daily production number for the progress of her equipage. Once she was reduced from such opportunities for opulent display, moreover, Robinson, the flâneuse who once stopped traffic, reinvented herself as “the English Sappho”, distinguishing herself as a poet who paid extraordinary and, in terms of eighteenth-century norms, even unprecedented attention to metrical and sonic technique. The implication of this argument is that the surfaces of her poetry are, historically speaking, of greater import than their depths, and I hope to demonstrate that this is by no means a pejorative judgement. In addition, it is to those surfaces, I think, that we should look for the influence Robinson exerted on later poets of the nineteenth century. For her successors in the English-speaking world, it is not too much to argue, she changed the very nature of the craft of poetry.

Let us begin, however, with the large picture of the eighteenth century, and more particularly with the sense of role that women poets brought to their increasing freedom of entrance into the literary profession. In the summer of 2000, there occurred a brief exchange on the chat-room provided by the North American Association for the Study of Romanticism concerning the septuagenarian Anna Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, which inadvertently cast considerable light on its formal properties. The gist of the commentary was the assertion that at this point in literary history the poem's couplet ambience was thoroughly retrograde. This view was predicated on the ahistorical notion that by 1812 someone—probably Wordsworth—had so altered the fortunes of the couplet that no one but old ladies seriously wrote in the form. Of course, Barbauld turned to the couplet with a strict sense of its generic decorum, one established in British verse over several centuries, for the kind of jeremiad she wished to publish. What seemed most anomalous about criticism of this sort was not just its refusal to give credit where it was due—let us say, in terms of the metrical refinement and rhetorical power of the poem's opening lines—but, within a larger perspective, its inattention to the obvious care Barbauld paid to craft throughout her career. We might think, for instance, of the “Ode to Spring”, the dazzling unrhymed lyric of the 1773 Poems, which was clearly written in silent contention with what all contemporaries regarded as the superlative artistic success achieved by her predecessor in the form she used, William Collins, whose “Ode to Evening” enjoyed an extraordinary eighteenth-century reputation as the English work that had finally recreated a truly Grecian lyric form without rhyme. Whatever claims might be made for that poem, it should be clear that in all points of this contention, but especially in making attenuated sentences flow without convolution across multiple stanzas, Barbauld outdid Collins, which was precisely her aspiration, though it may not have been publicly marked in her own day. Like much of the volume in which it appeared, the “Ode to Spring” is conspicuous for its classical crafting, claiming an equality with the contemporary expectations of male poets. Indeed, this was exactly the question raised by the notice of the volume that appeared in the Monthly Review, which wondered that any woman would wish to invest her work with so pronounced a sense of classical decorum.²

I stress this point because it should be obvious—but, paradoxically, it may be so much so as to be overlooked in our assessments—that women entering a literary culture and a marketplace dominated by male privilege and shared values would pay utmost attention to the protocols from which they had been hitherto excluded, whether evinced through the conspicuous classical tagging and intertextuality that are hallmarks of Barbauld's volume or, more generally, through laying a stress on their ability to manage the tools of their craft with dexterity. Moreover, for bourgeois women, an attention to a honed craft is the essence of the very notion of “accomplishment”, which, however derided by Wollstonecraft and like educational theorists, was still, in practice, the goal of most adolescent girls' training. Beneath this external emphasis on decorative graces we might want to add a largely hidden foundation in a pronounced wariness concerning physical appearance and presentation of the kind we can discern in virtually every female protagonist of the fiction of the period, from Burney to Edgeworth to Austen: for those who are not always on guard, like Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, or who are unable to control their representation, as is the position of Edgeworth's Belinda, the costs can be immediate and painful and can threaten their entire future welfare. Robinson, of course, knew that from hard experience. That the surface, then, should be of such crucial importance to a woman's managing her several public roles and her underlying selfhood is an essential cultural fact of late eighteenth-century British culture, even at the same time as this age manifests the first major emergence of women into a professional literary milieu that would allow some of them at least financial and personal independence.

Without constructing a neatly potted history, what we are witnessing in the complex just outlined is why, in the early 1780s, it was virtually inevitable that an enterprising woman with necessity at the door refounded the sonnet as the quintessential woman's genre, one allowing a culturally accepted outlet for a highly formalized complaint voicable within a constraining structure that invited modest creative license without subverting its inescapable boundaries. Under Charlotte Smith's tutelage, the sonnet was revived as intellectual piecework, demanding something like an hour's close attention to various elements of fine detailing, subtleties of coloration, and idiomatic nuance within its already established structure. It took far less time to scribble than a sampler did to stitch, perhaps, but there are clearly underlying formal similarities between them as an outlet for woman's accomplishment, not to mention for keeping idle hands busy. Under this impetus, for the next quarter century, whatever the variations introduced by the landscape sonnets of William Lisle Bowles or the sharp political profiles submitted by the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the sonnet was a genre that was insistently gendered female. That only changed when the enterprising William Wordsworth, ever attuned to the appropriation of the poetics of sensibility, reclaimed and degendered the sonnet in the two sequences he published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. It is within this context, then, that one must observe how carefully Mary Robinson positions herself in Sappho and Phaon, not just in the forty-four poem sonnet sequence à clef, with its thinly veiled allegorization of her being jilted, but in its complexly layered introductory matter as well, where she encloses the traditional role of wronged woman of the verses within an opposing and even reversed perspective, one that would be highly unconventional were its subject not that of the sonnet, the persona of universal literary and historical arbiter. Those in the know in London's literary and social circles would presumably understand why it was that Robinson would use the conventions of the sonnet sequence to shame Banastre Tarleton, but they would be just as perspicuous about the assumptions underlying the overtly learned and judicious introductory matter that framed the verse.³

If Mary Robinson in private was unable ever to rectify her social obloquy, she was as a public person a genius at self-representation: the numerous poetic personae she wrote under during the 1790s testify to the protean nature of her guises and her voices. Her sense that you are as you represent yourself, or—given the ubiquity of the portraits Reynolds and other fashionable artists of the late eighteenth century did of her—as you allow yourself to be represented, finds a counterpart in the surprising technical effects of her poems. Witness “The Birth-Day”, a poem on the public celebration of the birthday of Queen Charlotte dating from January 1795. This poem offers us a useful entrance into the characteristics of Robinson's lyrical achievement. Its progressive political stance is of a piece with her customarily outspoken liberal sentiments, though we may observe how alert she is not to cross the line from generalities to, let us say, a specifically anti-monarchist perspective that might be deemed actionable. Indeed, the sympathetic political tone, with its stark contrasts, is rather easily purchased, and if we were to try to engage the poem more minutely within the terms we might bring to Coleridge's poetry of this same period, something like “The Destiny of Nations”, let us say, we would find ourselves, I think, unable to move beyond the generalized, even beyond the trite. That is to say, on an ideological level we might wish to discriminate a lack of either depth or resonance in “The Birth-Day”. But if it lacks depth, it possesses a brilliant, even wholly innovative, surface. Its political power comes not from statement but from effect, not from substance but from figuration.

“The Birth-Day” is without precedent in English poetry, as far as I can discern, for its radical metonymic construction. As the poor are in the customary manner reduced into their condition—“pale Mis'ry” (8), “the Beggar” (25)—aristocracy, against all normative assumptions, is likewise assimilated into the semiotics of its representation. Robinson's high world is introduced by a “gaudy, gilded chair” that “bounds” (1) along the street without apparent support, since, implicitly, the actual bearers are erased from the consciousness of the chair's inhabitant or the throngs gathered to gawk at their betters. If the bearers are invisible servants, the object of attention is likewise concealed, withdrawn into an impenetrable privacy, leaving behind only a shell of unrealized metaphorical suggestiveness. Still, it “bounds”. To shift the plane on which we experience the action's taking place, in line 6 the “pamper'd Countess glares along”, not so much a person as a mirror in transit, whose jewels and begemmed garments reflect back upon our gaze, also concealing her actual person. The Duchess of the sixth and seventh stanzas is similarly “silver'd, and embroider'd o'er” (25) so that “amidst jewels, feathers, flow'rs” (21), she “sits demure” (22), that is, inhabits the form of a posture devoid of personality. She is “senseless” (22) of the plight of the poor, to be sure, but Robinson's figuration intimates that she exists likewise in a senseless state, without sentience, absorbed into the terms of her representation. I call this figuration radically metonymic, but that term begs for elucidation. It is not that the part simply stands for the whole: it is that there is no whole, only parts; no essence, only representation; no humanity, only its attributes. At this level, if we can return to the comparison with a poem like Coleridge's apocalyptic “Destiny of Nations”, Robinson's daring innovation can be given its proper measure. The “depth” of Coleridge's poem is provided by its stark enumeration of the multiple, interconnected evils of modern civilization and by the apocalyptic resolution promised by revelation and centuries of Judeo-Christian commentary upon it. But, its flamboyant rhetoric to the side, is its depth any less trite—that is to say, hackneyed or recycled—than the lame conclusion of Robinson's poem? Except for its end, her poem is startlingly original, in a way that his is not, through its complete avoidance of culturally sanctioned resolution, by its reliance on representation as self-sufficient to reveal a vacuity in signification at the heart of modern culture.

The concentration of the “The Birth-Day” on social signifiers without signification, in turn, leads us to a similarly radical use of representation in another poem from the same month, “January 1795”. That simultaneity of dates might suggest to us the value of reading into Robinson's experiments a kind of internal logic of the kind, say, that we are accustomed to accord the progressive formal development of Keats's odes across his journal letter of early 1819. At least, the similarity of figurative inventiveness in the two poems seems directly to link them as expressions of her conscious artistry. In place of a procession of costly garments as figures of concealment, in “January 1795” Robinson turns to the equivalent of newspaper headlines superimposed one upon the other. Again, the technique, which may bring to mind comparable figurative usage a century later—from cubism, to Dadaism, to modernist montage—is employed for radical effect. We may discern certain common threads to the imagery: an emphasis on wartime conditions, on extremes of wealth and poverty, on sexual roles and perspectives, on innocence and corruption. Yet, what is of greatest moment is not such points of similarity, but simple disjunction. Nothing connects, as the complete avoidance of any enjambment among the lines implicitly testifies. Whereas “The Birth-Day” reduced its human representatives to the status of their representations, “January 1795” eschews even that gesture toward coherence. In this culture we are all isolated within our atomizations: we do not so much reveal our vacuity of signification, as in the other poem, as the fact that we do not actually signify at all, since signification depends on a stable central point of cultural reference. Instead, the poem is pointedly without progress, or even an Aristotelian logic, even as it depends for its movement on gerunds, which are syntactically speaking, substantives, verbal elements that are essentially nouns. The caesuras of its last stanza neatly intensify the rhetoric as a means of rounding out the poem, but its lack of resolution is as manifest as its lack of progressive development. This is a lyric of pure surface: whatever depth it possesses is provided by its readers' individual reactions to the jumble of its disassembled signifiers.

The common date and shared technical experimentation with “The Birth-Day” may be used to develop an enveloping perspective in which to characterize Robinson's poetics. Although, like Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson delves into existential states that are generally more extreme than what her male counterparts allow themselves, I do not believe that the complex we have been tracing should be construed from a thematic point of view. Indeed, I am not at all sure that there even is a cultural or psychological complex that would allow us to attach the label Robinsonian to it, in the way we speak so confidently of matters that are Coleridgean or Wordsworthian. To illustrate this perspective, let us turn to another poem in which disjointed quiddity constitutes both medium and message, “London's Summer Morning”, a poem that appeared in the Morning Post (23 August 1800) during Robinson's extraordinary final year. In reading over the opening cadence of this verse, we cannot but hear its unusual timbres.

Who has not wak'd to list the busy sounds
Of summer's morning, in the sultry smoke
Of noisy London? On the pavement hot
The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face
And tatter'd covering, shrilly bawls his trade,
Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door
The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell
Proclaims the dustman's office; while the street
Is lost in clouds impervious. Now begins
The din of hackney-coaches, waggons, carts;
While tinmen's shops, and noisy trunk-makers,
Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters,
Fruit barrows, and the hunger-giving cries
Of vegetable venders, fill the air.

(1-14)

I have written elsewhere about how Robinson's experiments with blank verse in her last years recall those of Robert Southey.⁴ In raising the issue again here, I do so not from an interest in assigning primacy or influence, only, once again, so as to emphasize the ongoing technical experimentation engaging Robinson's sustained attention. Still, whereas Southey's deliberately flattened blank verse in general reads like prose chopped up into ten-syllable lines, in a poem like this Robinson maintains a delicate balancing act, which through conspicuous enjambment and enumerative serialization manages to represent the prosaic within a verse form that calls attention to its own status as verse. I mean by this that in this passage we actually feel the effect of beginning every sentence after the first mid-line, as we likewise cannot avoid the sense of impacted details dictating the lines' closure. Even the spilling-over of lines 11-12—“While tinmen's shops, and noisy trunk-makers, / Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters”—calls attention to the fact that these too are ten-syllable lines forced by necessity to accommodate a reality that does not reduce to iambic pentameter regularity. And then, of course, there is the sound: line 12 is a masterful tongue-twister, combining cacophony and an inescapable verbal Englishness. But if these values are particularly pronounced in this case, they are essential to the poem's success. It is a deliberately rude poem, unconcerned with nicety, palliation, euphemism.

Yet, the most startling feature of “London's Summer Morning” exists on the secondary level of its intertextuality. If the title does not alert us, by the time we come to “Now begins / The din of hackney-coaches” (9-10), we know we have entered the same ambience as Swift's “Description of the Morning” (the opening lines of which are “Now hardly here and there an hackney-coach / Appearing showed the ruddy morn's approach”). But the line should be construed as an intertextual signal, not a mere borrowing: like “The ruddy housemaid [who] twirls the busy mop” and several other direct references, it is meant to recreate Swift's world within the confines of another London street scene ninety years later. Here, too, there is someone who fulfills the occupation of the “schoolboys [who] lag with satchels in their hands”; that is to say, the figure of “The poor poet [who] wakes from busy dreams, / To paint the summer morning” (41-42). Once the poet enters the scene, we notice, the iambic pentameter, however roughly drawn, disappears, trailing off into a seven-syllable phrase—“To paint the summer morning”—with an unstressed ending and, pointedly, no closure. At this very moment, however, in which we recognize the similar position of the lagging schoolboys and the waking poet, we discern the crucial difference between Swift's brilliantly understated poem and Robinson's catalog. The lagging schoolboys are being drawn into a world of misplaced ambition and endemic corruption to which every single element of Swift's poem subtly but surely points. In contrast, Robinson's poet wakes from “busy dreams” to a busier reality, to a world of a surely disjointed but, at the same time, an endlessly unfolding variety, a world she proceeds to limn in the colors, one presumes, of the present poem. The one detail that constitutes the poem's closest approximation to the terms of Swift's world instead reveals how very different it is from it.

                                                                                                    All along
The sultry pavement, the old-clothes man cries
In tone monotonous, and side-long views
The area for his traffic: now the bag
Is slily open'd, and the half-worn suit
(Sometimes the pilfer'd treasure of the base
Domestic spoiler), for one half its worth,
Sinks in the green abyss.

(32-39)

“The base / Domestic spoiler” is, of course, a burglar, a felon, perhaps the grandson of one of those schoolboys who lagged behind ninety years before. Whatever his genesis, his presence in the poem is dictated by reality, not morality. He and the old-clothes man exist as parasites on the social body, an inextricable, inescapable part of the general economy of exchange in which every person in the poem is engaged. Though the language—“base / Domestic spoiler”—would seem to promise aversion or moral superiority, its timbres are never extended beyond their utterance. The criminal activity is raised to be dropped conspicuously, exchanged for “The porter [who] now / Bears his huge load along the burning way” (39-40) and the waking poet. And then we are done: as a substitute for a finite closure, there is only the recyclable poem, ending where it begins, recording the prismatic surfaces of the ever-recycling street scene. The only realm that exists outside it is one of pure fantasy—the poet's “busy dreams”—that may or may not be a refuge from reality. But that we will never know, because they are never allowed to intrude upon this representation of the real. The best we may surmise is that they, too, exist as a further re-presentation, reimagination, of its elements.

Having now invoked the imagination—Romantic or quite otherwise—I want insistently to back away from the theoretical questions that inevitably arise from so determined an investment in the quiddity of the world as these poems involve. This is not a dodge but a gesture toward historical accuracy. Since, at the time Robinson is writing, the imagination has yet to receive its various Romantic elaborations and definitions, that fact seems to me ample excuse for allowing poetic quiddity itself, rather than critical abstraction from it, to dictate the development of this argument. For we are concerned here, above all else, with the areas of poetic technique in which Robinson adopted an experimental tack, and I see her in this arena on which I have just been concentrating pursuing an aesthetic that is strikingly modern, associated in the USA with the Black Mountain School and with the central figure of Frank O'Hara, one-time curator of the Museum of Modern Art, one where there is nothing beyond representation itself—no ineffable realm that transports figures into symbols, no moral or religious absolute by which the poet's utterances are privileged, nothing whatsoever that can be considered transcendental, only textuality in its manifold forms.⁵ Perhaps this is why, when Robinson reverts to a stock moral position and a Shakespearean tag in order to effect closure, as in “The Birth-Day”, the effect seems so strained. The endings of the other two poems I have cited are notably stronger because, paradoxically, they have only technique—the chiseled half-lines of “January 1795”, the conspicuous break-up of the metrics in “London's Summer Morning”—to carry their conclusions.

And this allows us to revert to the centrality of poetic technique and to the essential critical justice of Coleridge's observation, in a letter to Southey written after just reading “The Haunted Beach” in the Morning Post. (This was the newspaper, we recall, to which Coleridge sporadically contributed, but where Southey through 1798-99 had occupied the post of staff poet, to be replaced only in 1800 by Robinson, who that year by my count published at least ninety-eight poems in its columns.) The “poem falls off sadly to the last”, Coleridge writes, singling out the concluding moralism, “but the Metre—ay! that Woman has an Ear”.⁶ If the effects we have been considering so far, for the most part, stem from Robinson's concentration on what the eye can discern, as well as what lies beyond its powers of penetration, and therefore on the disjunctions that arise at the point of their intersection, the refinement of her ear led Robinson not just to anticipate a future poetics of concrete representation but to create a wholly new dispensation for lyric poetry in English whose effect was widespread and immediate, if never, as far as I can discern, openly traced from her particular practices.

Robinson's metrical and sonic experiments, unlike those we have encountered with the field of figurative representation, seem confined to her writings of the last year or so. Lyrical Tales, published late in 1800, constitutes a virtuoso display of them. And to place the volume in its proper context, I would make the simple, blanket but true, observation that this volume, published in the waning months of the eighteenth century, represents the single most inventive use of metrics in English verse since the Restoration. It is easy to read Lyrical Tales within a cast of expectations honed by later writers of the nineteenth century and therefore to miss its astonishing originality; it is much more difficult to strip ourselves of that later history and return to the actual landscape in which Robinson, deeply ill and making her final claim to lasting prominence, was laboring. She acknowledged, in canvassing potential publishers, that she was working within the shadow of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads⁷, but what she could not say in such a letter was how much more strongly she was accentuating their common adjective, the lyrical. Wordsworth and Coleridge's title is, by deliberate plan, an oxymoron, emphasizing, as its conception of the lyrical, a psychological perspective arising naturally within what had been in the traditional ballad a field of unselfconscious action, necessitating that we read deeply, looking for secondary and hidden meanings. Robinson is concerned primarily with lyrical effect, the surface: where she does enter into the arena of psychic perspective, as in “All Alone”, the first poem in the volume, she tends to disrupt the overly easy analytical categorizations around which Wordsworth constructs the majority of his poems in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Her little boy, like the procession of “The Birth-Day”, simply cannot be “read”.

If Mary Robinson, in her rivalry with the younger poets, seems little interested in merely adapting the ballad measure of both Wordsworth and Coleridge, she shows herself almost obsessed with the effects to be derived from various of the devices associated with the old ballads. Although her meters are loose rather than regular—except for several poems like “The Widow's Home” in that flattened blank verse observed earlier, for instance, there are otherwise strikingly few iambs in extended sequence—they evince elaborate patterning within their insistently colloquial timbres. In poem after poem Robinson employs devices of syncopation, or of a diverse melodic cadencing, drawn, it would appear, from folk songs, to exemplify a populist lyricism unbound from the strictures of formal eighteenth-century decorum. Four poems play with variations on the ballad refrain, emphasizing a pattern of rhymes or repeated words to which each stanza inevitably returns. And it is here that Robinson achieves her most striking technical breakthrough.

Let us look for a moment at the metrical scheme of the poem Coleridge so praised, “The Haunted Beach”.

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 deafening roar
Re-echoed 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 shadowy 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.

To begin with, the first four lines of each stanza are constituted within the expectation of ballad meter: the absence of rhyme in line 1 and the unrepeated internal rhyme of line 3, indeed, force us into the old poulter's measure of the sixteenth century. Yet, this is not a fourteener, as it was called: rather, because of the feminine rhyme—or rime riche—of lines 2 and 4, we have a fifteener, and because of this, in each case the doubled rhyme word effects a particularly hard stop. The final five lines of the stanza break between a true ballad line of fourteen syllables in lines 5 and 6, and an octosyllabic couplet in lines 7 and 8 that is forcibly enjambed so as to overflow into the antipestic dimeter of line 9—though Robinson, too, forestalls its regularity through the reversed stress of “billows”.

However, to reduce the meter in this manner to its intricately patterned technical components is to neglect the remarkable tonal effect achieved through them. With the small end stops of lines 2 and 4, the sharp closure of line 6, and the hard blockage of the final, ninth line, Robinson creates a stanza that cannot break through its constraints. Even the enjambment of line 8 only increases our sense of entrapment within the quasi-refrain of the end. The stanzaic form is, to put it simply, haunted—forced, like the tide that dominates the poem and “Re-echo[s] on the chalky shore” (8) to turn back on itself, unable to break free of a predetermined mechanism of control.

Yet, it is not, as it were, only the inescapable flux and reflux of the tides that traps us within this pattern of repetition. That is to say, more than just metrics is responsible for the remarkable effects Robinson attains. For, once again, the quiddity of material nature is so marked as to participate in the strange timbres produced by Robinson's meter: “The Sea-weeds gath'ring near the door / A sombre path display'd” (5)—“And all around, the craggs were bound / With weeds—for ever waving” (12-13); “lofty barks were shatter'd” (4)—“And near the sands, at ebb of tide, / A shiver'd mast was seen to ride” (16-17); “Above, a jutting cliff was seen / Where Sea Birds hover'd, craving” (10-11)—“And then, above the haunted hut / The Curlews screaming hover'd” (37-38). The latter example is the most telling: what is it those capitalized Sea Birds crave; why are these capitalized Curlews always hovering? Of course, Robinson introduces simple details of any common seashore, but, in very few lines, she turns the commonplace into the eerie. The verbal units that so effectively drive but dislocate “January 1795” return with an incumbent sense of a process that is alien, unchanging, and unstoppable—waving, craving. And this is incessantly reinforced by the terms of the refrain. Nature sports with human misery: stanza after stanza, year after year, those “green billows play'd”.

The congruence of form and content in this poem is, to adopt a term with many later associations, uncanny. Yet, as with the poems whose figurative structures we were considering earlier, the end is decidedly not a congruence of medium and message. The message is inadequate; even, it would seem, inappropriate, to the self-contained technical brilliance of the form Robinson creates. The beach is haunted by the combined effects of imagery and meter. Murder, one supposes, will out, but it has nothing to do with the success of Robinson's poem.

Nor is it the point, even if its revelation once again constitutes the denouement, of Robinson's most radical experiment of the sort we have been observing, “The Savage of Aveyron”, which appears to have been written in the autumn of 1800 after Lyrical Tales had gone to press and just weeks before her death. In the 1801 Memoirs it is celebrated as “This last offspring of Mrs. Robinson's Muse”.⁸ Although Judith Pascoe represents the meter of this poem as deriving from that of Coleridge's “Kubla Khan”, which Robinson had read in manuscript during the autumn of 1800⁹, I would want to retreat from too quickly asserting correspondence between these two poems, as I would, likewise, between “The Haunted Beach” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. It is true that Coleridge, in these poems and in “Christabel”, also pursues technical effects of meter and sound that in their generalized nature may be considered similar. But Coleridge's are more tonal than systematic in their effect, and, except for “The Rime”, of course, they were kept from common sight for another seventeen years. In any case, what is absent from them is the poetics of repetition, which in the case of “The Savage of Aveyron”, go far beyond the relatively simple, if intricately displayed, machinery of “The Haunted Beach”, as it has been elucidated here. What is, indeed, most daring about “The Savage of Aveyron” is how far beyond the earlier poem's techniques Robinson is determined to go. She sheds all traditional poetic decorum or emotional restraint, turning the poem into a flamboyant, even outrageously ostentatious, piece of metrical theater. Instead of a single-line refrain with shifting elements, in this latter poem the refrain, again with shifting elements, is expanded into four lines. The narrative voice is deliberately rendered hysterical, overwrought from the very beginning. The repeated apostrophe, “O! mazy woods of Aveyron! / O! wilds of dreary solitude”, has an edge of madness to it, repeated as an obsessive compulsion that is never—seemingly cannot ever be—explained to the reader. Indeed, for all its surface poetic articulateness, the poem is paradoxically in the position of its ostensible subject, who cannot speak, except for one word, “alone”. That is to say, it represents within its elaborate tonal range a psychological state wholly unsusceptible to analysis. In these circumstances, whether the narrator “wish'd myself—a traveller alone” (27), the end of the second stanza, or, its opposite, “sigh'ed to be—a traveller alone” (39), the end of the third, seems somehow immaterial. Nothing appears quite real in this poem, which is suffused with atmosphere rather than actualities. Even its one repeated physical element, a “blasted tree”, is not quite whole: it looks like a tree, but it no longer blooms like a tree. If in her earlier experiments, Robinson had explored a poetics of totalized materiality, in “The Savage of Aveyron”, she appears to have attempted a radical reversal, a poetics in which there is only prolepsis, intimation, suggestiveness—also—“While terror-fraught I stood” (8)—perhaps, a dread that is at once inexplicable and compulsive. This is a world that is patently absurd—but then, so is schizophrenia. And like madness, the poem, even as it throws off all restraint, represents itself as sane.

What truly makes “The Savage of Aveyron” and, to a lesser extent, “The Haunted Beach” like “Kubla Khan” or “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is not their metrics, but their attempt through poetic effect to create a parallel universe that seems to be akin to ours but to operate by laws to which our norms are alien. This is what separates these poems from the ambience of 1790s Gothicism, with which otherwise they might have much in common. In this parallel universe, the pulse of our ongoing life is provided by an incessant meter, reducing every event in its path to the same determined and predetermining systolic rhythm. There, we breathe not air, but atmosphere. The objects of its attention are atomized through disjunction or are magnified out of proportion through repetition, and through repetition they become, like fetishes and phobias, individualized psychic markers that this universe allows to be exhibited as normal. As the rage for the Gothic largely dies out by the 1820s, this poetic universe subsists to be explored continually and broadly throughout nineteenth-century verse in English. The dangers for any poet who seeks to inhabit it is that it can easily go over the line into the merely mannered, or into camp. But this limitation is also part of its challenge. And to the writer as artist it also promises the challenge of individual technical inventiveness: every poem a new sampler. All one need do to see how this plays out is to skim through a volume of Elizabeth Barrett's poetry or Christina Rossetti's. The latter's “Goblin Market” (dare one admit it, at this late date of critical attention?) is as trite in the parable its teachers are all required to explicate as is the moral of “The Birth-Day”, but its dazzling pyrotechnics, its thumping meter, it sheer excesses in rhyming, its beautiful ugliness, they are eternal wonders to behold back in this dull world of our regained respectability where we buy our never-quite-ripe fruit at the corner shop.

And, of course, as these examples roundly demonstrate, this is a woman's legacy, carried on by women. But it is also, and most important, a woman's legacy assimilated into the mainstream of verse in English and championed by its principal male figures as well. Rather than continue an analytical disquisition that would lead us beyond the subject, however, I point at the end to a famous poem by the central Victorian man-of-letters that must instantly remind one of Mary Robinson and show in implicit terms how great was her legacy to the poets that would follow her, poets who, in the general eclipse of her reputation and art in the succeeding generation, I suspect, never really knew where it all began. It is, indeed, a brilliant poem on its own merits, but its material details fraught with psychic reverberance and its hyperventilating emotions, not to ignore its shifting four-line refrain, mark it surely as inhabiting that parallel universe created by Mary Robinson a generation earlier.

All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creaked;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the moldering wainscot shrieked,
Or from the crevice peered about.
Old faces glimmered through the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then, said she, “I am very dreary,
He will not come,” she said;
She wept, “I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!”

This is the end of Tennyson's “Mariana”, published in 1830, and a poem that it is hard to imagine could have been written without Mary Robinson's experiments to create a new lyric form in English verse.

Notes

1. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. All quotations of the poetry refer to Pascoe (2000) Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press).

2. Monthly Review, 48 (January, February, 1773), pp. 54-49; 133-137. The complaint about the overly masculine nature of Barbauld's style is voiced on the last page. The comment can be found reproduced in Betsy Rodgers (1958) Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and Her Family (London: Methuen), pp. 59-60. Rodgers identifies the reviewer as William Woodfall (p. 197, n. 13)

3. The same multilayered, artful emphasis is conveyed by the full title of the volume: Sappho and Phaon, in a Series of Legitimate Sonnets, with Thoughts on Poetical Subjects, and Anecdotes of the Grecian Poetess.

4. See Curran (1994) “Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context” in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson & Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

5. For a valuable placing of Frank O'Hara as a crucial voice in modern poetics, see Marjorie Perloff (1977, 1998), Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters (New York: George Braziller; revised edn Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

6. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Lesley Griggs (1966-71) (Oxford: Clarendon Press), I, p. 576.

7. See Pascoe's Introduction to Selected Poems, pp. 53-54 and notes.

8. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself (London: R. Phillips, 1801), III, pp. 173-174.

9. See Selected Poems, p. 332.