The Selected Poems of Mary Robinson is now out from Shearsman – edited by me!
Publisher’s details HERE: Mary Robinson - Selected Poems (shearsman.com)
The publisher's sample of the book may be read here: mary-robinson-selected-poems-sampler.pdf (cdn-website.com)
Mary Robinson’s sonnet sequence ‘Sappho and Phaon’ was unknown to me until I began to search out sonnets for the third volume of my transpositions of the form, British Standards, which I had decided would focus upon the work of Romantic era poets. Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). I had already re-functioned the work of Robinson’s contemporary, Charlotte Smith, for volume one, The English Strain (Shearsman, 2021), but even she did not furnish a clear sequence of sonnets. (See here: Pages: More 'English Strain' poems (overdubs of Charlotte Smith) published on the Anthropocene platform (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)) My ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ reworks fourteen of the poems, superimposing Tabitha (Mary) and Thunderer upon the story of Sappho and Phaon, and upon the contemporary politics of Brexit, the mismanagement of the Coronavirus Pandemic, and the surgent Black Lives Matter! (‘Thunderer’ in one of Gillray’s most egregious satires on Mary’s short-cropped lover from Liverpool, Banastre Tarleton. The Tarletons of Liverpool were a family of lusty slavers.) In my version, Tabitha wasn’t going to kill herself for the sake of the unworthy Thunderer, any more than Mary was for Tarleton! See here: Pages: My 'Tabitha and Thunderer' is published in Blackbox Manifold (robertsheppard.blogspot.com), and here for lots of images: Pages: My Transpositions of Mary Robinson's sonnets 'Tabitha and Thunderer' are now complete (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) I’m going to post my longer biography of Mary soon: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 2: The Life of Mary Robinson (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
It was a lot to carry but the sequence was (as much as
Wordsworth’s 1802-3 sonnets, or John Clare’s manifold sonnets that I’d ‘used’
elsewhere) sturdy enough to carry the burden (as in pressure and in song). To
my mind, rightly or wrongly, this was a test of poetic strength that even
Southey and S.T. Coleridge failed (though Hartley Coleridge passed, another
underrated sonneteer who got the ‘British Standards’ treatment). I researched
Mary’s extraordinary life (via Paula Byrne’s Perdita, the first
biography I’d read), and some of her poetry itself, though I chiefly focused
upon my chosen sequence, discovered in one of my principal sources for Romantic
Era sonnets, Feldman and Robinson’s illuminating anthology, A Century of
Sonnets, 1999.
Tony
Frazer, editor of Shearsman, sometime based in Mary’s home town of Bristol, noted that I had transposed Robinson’s work in
‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ and asked whether I would edit a volume of her work for
the Shearsman Classics series. (Have a rummage through his list; it surprised
me what was there: Shearsman Poetry Books | Poetry Books Classic Titles)
Research for form and content is quite different from that of a literary
scholar and, though I am a poet-critic in the field of contemporary literature,
Tony’s suggestion gave me pause as a non-specialist. [Pause.] However, I
decided that I wanted to return the compliment to her work (or to atone for my
knowingly misreading appropriation of it, if you prefer) by presenting a selection
of the very best of her work as a non-specialist admirer for an equally
non-specialist general audience. (This is set against a contrary impulse to
present the range of her work, which is equally impressive.) Since this
is what Mary Robinson and her daughter were doing with her posthumously
published Poetical Works, I feel I am following in their
footsteps rather than those of notable Robinson scholars, who have nevertheless
enriched my understanding and guided my selection.
Indeed,
I decided I would use the three volumes of that 1806 publication, and I
acquired un-uniform facsimile editions of this uniform edition of her work (see
bibliography), and I read all the poems (and one play) and made my list
of A, B, C and D poems and passages, allowing myself to be persuaded by
biographical or critical-reputational concerns to add and subtract, and to
excerpt from longer poems. As I write, I have lists with mobile alternatives.
In many ways this replicates the moves I went through to select my own poems
(e.g., this post: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Selected
Poems (History or Sleep) - the de-selected poems and Pages: Robert Sheppard: How I
selected History or Sleep: Selected Poems.) How I
selected from Robinson (over several months) is unclear, but it was a quest for
the best, and I had to wade through a lot of work best only for the specialist’s
eye. Take Mary’s many Odes, for example. Coleridge in the Biographia mentions
the propensity of poets to write endless dull odes to (mainly) abstract nouns
(of course, he was just as guilty), though one of Mary’s best poems is
an Ode to Coleridge! (That gets in my selection, though the Odes to Della
Crusca, Genius, Reflection, Envy, Health, Vanity, even Melancholy, even the Nightingale,
Beauty, Eloquence, the Moon, Valour, etc. do not.)
That
brings us to another fascinating problem. Mary died in 1800, and she wrote 70
poems, and many of her best, in that last year. It’s tempting to publish just
these. They are her best, though of course I was already committed to
the 1796 Sappho and Phaon (and the whole of it). (Whoops, I’m
catching Mary’s penchant for italics!) I’d faced something like this before, in
the editing of Paul Evans’ The
Door at Taldir: The Selected Poems of Paul Evans, Exeter: Shearsman, 2009, which is
still available: Shearsman
Books buy Paul Evans - The Door of Taldir — Selected Poems.
This book, which I don’t mention on this blog until a post of March 2023 (here:
Pages:
Paul Evans' Selected Poems and Lee Harwood's Collected
(robertsheppard.blogspot.com)), meant I had to balance the
already-published poems (possibly the stronger ones, definitely the ones I liked
most) with the poems in an unpublished manuscript in the possession of Lee
Harwood. I knew that any poem from this manuscript that I didn’t pick – and
these I liked less than the early non-metrical poems – would never see the light
of day. It’s a position of some responsibility. With Robinson, there are other
available publications, even another selected, but it’s still a pressure to
deal with. In the end, you have to select - and things have to be cut (as any
poet, writer, editor, film or audio editor or director – regie! – even blogger, knows).
My
flippant remark about italics above reminds me of another problem which I
haven’t found an answer for yet. What to do about her italics and CAPITALS
(they sometimes seem like Trump’s Tweets, shouting at you!). At
the moment, I’m inclined to carry them over as other editors have done because
they are apparently present in Robinson's handwritten manuscripts, and are NOT just a
printer’s convention. Stuff like:
She sings
of THEE, O! favour’d child
Of Minstrelsy, SUBLIMELY
WILD!
Of thee, whose soul can feel the
tone
Which gives to airy dreams a
magic ALL THY OWN!
Spelling I might update lightly, ‘ecstasy’ for ‘extasy’, for example (though Robinson uses both spellings in one, admittedly long, poem!)
Returning
to ‘The English Strain’ project in which she appears, the first two volumes (in
which she does not appear) are available here: Pages: My THE ENGLISH STRAIN is
published today by Shearsman (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
The third volume with ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ is not published, though the poem
is itself available in two halves, online. See Pages: My 'Tabitha and Thunderer'
is published in Blackbox Manifold (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
I
shall record some significant stages of my editorial work. I might even post
some ‘de-selected’ poems as I did with my own Selected (see, for
example, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: de-selected
poem from History or Sleep: Putting Claws on the Glove (for Joan Brossa)
and here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Selected
Poems (History or Sleep) - the de-selected poems).
I
also think there might be another creative response to the work, but that is
only a mere brain-blip at the moment, with no concrete plans. It would have to be something other than transposing, since 'Tabitha and Thunderer' does that already. It’ll be
interesting to see whether I take that further. Or not.
Bibliography
Robinson, Mary. The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson, Volume 1. London: Richard Phillips, 1806; Forgotten Books facsimile reprint; London, 2018.
Robinson, Mary. The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs.
Mary Robinson, Volume 2. London:
Richard Phillips, 1806;
Scholar Select facsimile reprint; np:
nd.
Robinson,
Mary. The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson, Volume 3. London:
Richard Phillips, 1806; facsimile reprint; Miami: nd (possibly 2008)
Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 3 (possible contents) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
Pages: The Poems of Mary Robinson 4: Late Augustan or Early Romantic? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
Pages: My edition of the Selected Poems of Mary Robinson is out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
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