Reviews of my edition of the Selected Poems of Mary Robinson

ONE 

I’m pleased to say there has been a first review of my Shearsman edition of Mary Robinson’s poems, by MC Caseley in the very solid online magazine Litter, which I link to in my ‘blogroll’, and which I recommend. (For example, there’s a great review of Sarah Crewe’s brilliant new book, which I saw her reading from last night, and I’ll be sharing an online reading with her next week!).

Back to Mary. I particularly liked MC Caseley’s paragraph on ‘Sappho and Phaon’, which he (correctly) regards as the masterwork here, and says, ‘Much of the value of this collection and reassessment, however, must rest on her sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon, published in 1796, the first such since the Renaissance. This is undoubtedly powerful and revolutionary, taking freely from Pope and Ovid, but imposing a narrative frame around the events.’ (This seems more succinct than my introduction.) He continues, ‘In her introduction, Robinson also places Sappho among the other lovers traditionally associated with the sonnet form, such as Petrarch and Laura – a confident act of rewriting and appropriation,’ which is also nicely put. He calls my introduction ‘helpful and comprehensive’, which is gratifying. MC Caseley finds the early work too Augustan and Mary’s epic ‘The Progress of Liberty’ too Wordsworthian, but these reflect, of course, the poetic paradigms she worked between. I think there is a case for ‘The Progress of Liberty’, but it is good to see this review of my considerable and (I must admit) slightly surprising labours, particularly this week in which I have finally seen the three portraits of Mary Robinson in the Wallace Collection! So, thanks to MC Caseley and to Alan Baker, the editor of Litter.

Read the whole review HERE: Review - The Selected Poems of Mary Robinson | Litter

TWO

The second review is in a print magazine: David Caddy, review of Mary Robinson’s Selected Poems edited by Robert Sheppard in ‘Afterword’, Tears in the Fence 82, Autumn 2025. It is largely a descriptive notice of the book, its scope, a little of her life (which is, as Caddy says, 'extraordinary') with a reminder of her importance as 'a versatile poet', which is apt. Thanks for this unexpected review. 

The book may be purchased HERE: Mary Robinson - Selected Poems (shearsman.com) 

 

There’s quite a lot about Robinson on this blog, too, branching from a hubpost, here:  Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1

It’s worth saying I got ‘into’ Mary Robinson during the composition of my transpositions of Romantic sonnets, and ‘Sappho and Phaon’, which, as I say, Caseley rightly sees as a highlight of her work (which is voluminous), was subject to my satirical method in ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’. It’s a parody in some ways of the Ovid-Pope-Robinson narrative of Sappho and her obsessive love for hapless Phaon, but I refused to follow the sequence's tragic ending. Tabitha/Mary/Sappho takes back control of the plot, and the poem, and ‘Thunderer’/Phaon (and dare I say /Boris Johnson) is rebuffed, big time. I write about my poem here, Pages: My Transpositions of Mary Robinson's sonnets 'Tabitha and Thunderer' are now complete (hub post), a post posted seemingly well before this present volume was a twinkle in Shearsman editor Tony Frazer’s eye.

He suggested the task to me, after spotting ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ in the manuscript of British Standards, which he has also published. (See here: Pages: British Standards published by Shearsman - out now; this post has full contents and a video of a sample poem.) I dithered for a while (not being a critic of Romantic literature, but having read a fair bit, not least of all in preparing British Standards) - and then said 'Yes!'

The Poems of Mary Robinson 9: another drop out poem from my selection

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)

During the proof-reading process, I have discovered another poem that I am removing from my selected poems of Mary Robinson. I have been writing about her poetry, about her life, and about my processes of selection on this blog for some months, and there is a hub post that contains links to the other pages. The life and the account of the poems is probably the place to start. Here’s the hubpost: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) . Here’s how I first encountered, and creatively transposed, her poems: this editorial project came out of my own use of her sonnets ‘Sappho and Phaon’ (the whole of which is in my selection) for my ‘English Strain’ project, which I explain here: Pages: My 'Tabitha and Thunderer' is published in Blackbox Manifold (robertsheppard.blogspot.com), and here, where you will also find lots of images relating to her life: Pages: My Transpositions of Mary Robinson's sonnets 'Tabitha and Thunderer' are now complete (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). Oddly, I’m still referring to her work (and life) in my work. She appears in the poem I wrote for Iain Sinclair’s 80^th birthday (Pages: I'm in IS80 a book for Iain Sinclair at Eighty (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) – at least Simon Kovesi picked up on my reference), and in my new poem on the blues. (See also my complaint to the Slavery Museum in Liverpool about their misrepresentation of her relationship with Banastre Tarleton (‘Thunderer’ of my sonnets): Pages: The Poems of Mary Robinson 7: anti-slavery poems and Slavery Remembrance Day (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). He pops up in my poem about the blues.

Here is another removal, then. This poem I probably selected because of its bold replacement of image by words in a so-called ‘portrait’. Mary was literally much painted (as well as caricatured by the likes of Gillray). So it seemed fascinating to see that revisionary process at play, inner qualities elevated over physical beauty. However, re-reading it revealed it to be quite a thin poem, indeed a thin disguise (!), in that its unabashed ‘portraiture’ seemed self-serving (if intended unironically), even disingenuous. I wondered whether it was one of her persona poems. I could imagine Tabitha Bramble writing this ‘frank’ portrait. But evidence doesn’t suggest it was originally one of those. It first appeared in 1793, and the version I have is the shorter 1806 one, according to Judith Pascoe’s detailed bibliography. It’s probable this later version is censored, but I haven’t checked, since my editorial method dictates that I work solely from Mary’s 1806 POEMS. I’ve decided to leave it out. It’s biographically interesting, but as a literary artifice, rather than a biographical one, it’s not strong (and a selected poems must be strong, while evidencing writerly range). It’s worth reading, though. I still like the lines ‘When coxcombs tell me I’m divine,/I plainly see the weak design,’ though I think the final lines particularly uninspired.

Stanzas to a Friend Who Wished to Have My Portrait

E’EN from the early days of youth,

I’ve bless’d the sacred voice of truth –

   And candour is my pride:

I always speak what I believe;

I know not if I can deceive –

   Because I never tried.

 

I’m often serious, sometimes gay,

Can laugh the fleeting hours away,

   Or weep for others’ woe:

I’m proud! this fault you cannot blame,

Nor does it tinge my cheek with shame:

   Your friendship made me so.

 

I’m odd, eccentric, fond of ease,

Impatient, difficult to please;

   Ambition fires my breast:

Yet, not for wealth or titles vain;

Let but the LAUREL deck my strain,

   And dullness takes the rest.

 

In temper quick, in friendship nice;

I doat on genius, shrink from vice,

   And scorn the flatt’rer’s art:

With penetrating skill can see,

Where, mask’d in sweet simplicity,

   Lies hid the treach’rous heart.

 

If once betray’d, I scarce forgive;

And tho’ I pity all that live,

   And mourn for ev’ry pain,

Yet never could I court the great,

Or worship fools, whate’er their state;

   For falsehood I disdain.

 

I’m jealous, for I fondly love;

No feeble flame my heart can prove,

   Caprice ne’er dimm’d its fires:

I blush to see the human mind,

For nobler, prouder claims design’d,

   The slave of low desires.

 

Reserv’d in manner, where unknown;

A little obstinate, I own,

   And apt to form opinion;

Yet, envy never broke my rest,

Nor could self-int’rest bow my breast

   To folly’s base dominion.

 

No gaudy trappings I display,

Nor meanly plain, nor idly gay,

   Yet sway’d by fashion’s rule;

For singularity, we find,

Betrays to ev’ry reasoning mind,

   The pedant or the fool.

 

I fly the rich, the sordid crowd,

The little great, the vulgar proud,

   The ignorant and base:

To sons of genius homage pay,

And own their sov’reign right to sway –

   Lords of the human race.

 

When coxcombs tell me I’m divine,

I plainly see the weak design,

   And mock a tale so common:

Howe’er the flatt’ring strain may flow,

My faults, alas! too plainly show,

   I’m but a mortal woman!

 

Such is my portrait now believe;

My pencil never can deceive,

   And know me what I paint.

Taught in affliction’s rigid school,

I act from principle, not rule,

   No sinner, yet no saint.

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  (don’t use the Edge Hill email); website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

The Poems of Mary Robinson 8: An Excerpt from The Progress of Liberty

Here is a link that takes you to the hub post linking all my posts on my selection of Mary Robinson: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). How I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

 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)

‘The Progress of Liberty’, a late poem, from 1797-9, is also one of Mary Robinson’s more ambitious poems, a two-book epic in fact. She salami-sliced it for excerpt-poems in magazines, and in other selections of her work, the poems are presented in this way. I decided I wanted to give it a go as a complete work, but, of course, there’s not enough room, and I still had to excerpt. I chose the final sections of each book, and then thought I might smuggle in another part. Alas it doesn’t work, quite, but I want to post that smuggled passage here, as a taster for the whole.  

In ‘The Progress of Liberty’ superstition and servitude are several times rhetorically swept away, and a uniquely British sense of ‘liberty’ is proposed: a rational constitutional settlement of the separation of powers, as prefigured in, and enacted by, Magna Carta: ‘When her bold BARONS ratified their deed,/ Freedom has smil’d triumphant and secure.’ In the poem, superstition (despotic Catholicism allied to absolute monarchy, though it is never named as such) is attacked, but so are the tithes the British peasantry was obliged to pay to lords and landlords. (Her radicalism is pre-Industrial, of course, and a long way from that of the London Corresponding Society, for example, who had been unsuccessfully tried, somewhat chaotically, for treason in 1794.) The emphatic reference to ‘laws/ FORM’D FOR THE PEASANT AND THE PRINCE ALIKE’ may bring her former lover Prince George to mind (check out my 'life' here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 2: The Life of Mary Robinson (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) but it is a more general point about the ideal (if not actual) equity of the law. The presiding ‘Nature’s God’ is difficult to completely reconcile to the Christian deity; ‘he’ is more of a Romantic pantheistic energy as he manifests frequently in the poem, an instrument of a universal reason that is aligned to, but is not distinguishable from, liberty. ‘The Progress of Liberty’ is an impressive political poem, and being cast in epic form, its ending (conventionally) invokes the Muse:

                        REASON, pow’r sublime!

Accept the strain spontaneous from the MUSE,

Which nurs’d on Albion’s cliffs, delights to sing

Of LIBERTY, and thee, her ALBION’S boast.

Ultimately, for Robinson, it is poetry that will proclaim ‘REASON ratified’, ‘Shall bless her BRITISH shores’, and ‘BRITAIN’S sons,/ The sons of REASON! UNAPPALL’D and FREE!’ With these words, the two book epic ends, bringing reason to rest with freedom. However, its historical narrative occasionally can be specific; ‘Marat and Robespierre’ are referenced in footnotes to the lines ‘Two arch demons, the phalanx led /Lawless and cruel,’ but this welcome political specificity is rare. As expected, for a poem working at an epic level, its least effective and less affective lines are those in which abstractions are addressed directly and personified. Abstractions are not merely inert but are replete with the energy of live political debate, especially when animated by narratives of struggle and community. At the same time, the poem contains some of Robinson’s best-written and elevated blank verse (Miltonian in derivation, precursorily Wordsworthian) which carries the rational but passionate message across the rhythmical waves of its verse paragraphs. Here’s that passage from Book One. In it, Robinson presents a political prisoner or prisoner of conscience, as we say now, who is condemned to death. (In the previous lines the reader is presented with a deservingly condemned murderer.) His dedication to reason and freedom, virtues of the entire poem, gives him inner strength.

                         In his low cell

The patient child of persecution sits,

Pensively sad. His uncomplaining tongue,

His steadfast eye, his lean and pallid cheek,

Grac’d with the stamp of dignified disdain,

Wait the approach of death. No haggard glance

Ruffles the placid orb, whose lustre, dimm’d

By dungeon vapours, like a dewy star,

Gleams ’midst surrounding darkness. On his lip

Smiles innocence, enthron’d in modest pride,

And eloquently silent! On his breast

His folded arms (shielding his guiltless heart

From the damp poisons of a living grave),

Are firmly interwoven; while his soul,

Calm as the martyr at the kindling pyre,

Holds strong with resignation. Who will now

Breathe the contagious mischiefs of his cell?

Who quit the gorgeous splendours of the sun,

To watch with him the slowly-wasting lamp,

Dim with obtrusive vapours? Who will share

The bread of misery, and with the breath

Of sympathy more palatable make

The cup of human sorrow? Who resign

The midnight revelry of happier scenes,

Turn from the banquet and illumin’d hall,

The throne of flaunting beauty, gaily deck’d,

The costly shows of life, to count with him

The silent hours of anguish? Tell, O TRUTH!

Thou heav’n-descended judge! what has he done?

Has he refus’d to bend the flexile knee

Before the blood-stain’d foot of ruthless pow’r?

To fawn upon the bloated, lordly fool,

Who claim’d his vassalage? Has he refus’d

To load the groaning altars of the church;

Libell’d, by truth, some wanton, courtly dame;

Or, like an arrogant, rebellious knave,

Dar’d talk of freedom? Say, O vengeful MAN!

Are these thy destin’d victims? Is it thus

Thou deal’st the meed of justice? Dost thou think

Thy petty rage will sever them from HIM,

Whose attribute is mercy, and whose grace

Mocks all distinctions? O! let NATURE speak,

And with instinctive force inform thy soul,

That LIBERTY, the choicest boon of heav’n,

Is REASON’S birth-right, and the gift of God!...

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  (don’t use the Edge Hill or the supanet emails); website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

The Poems of Mary Robinson 7: anti-slavery poems and Slavery Remembrance Day

Here’s a hubpost to all of those I’m posting now on my Selected Poems of Mary Robinson: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) 

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)

*

About a month ago I paid a visit to the Slavery Museum in Liverpool, as I explain in my email below. I thought I’d post it online, since it outlines ways in which Mary Robinson is travestied, even now. The contemporary scandal and the Victorian revulsion at it never quite rubbed off this remarkable woman. And I thought I’d post it today because it is Slavery Remembrance Day. Here’s what’s on today at the Museum : Slavery Remembrance Day 2023 | National Museums Liverpool (liverpoolmuseums.org.uk) And here’s what’s happening in London: Slavery Remembrance Day 2023 | National Maritime Museum (rmg.co.uk) .I haven’t received a reply to my email (yet). They probably think I’m a nutter. (They must get hate mail: a racist group protested outside the Museum last week, with a nice big banner saying ‘White Lives Matter’.) In some schools in the US the 'benefits' of slavery are being taught.

Dear Sir or Madam

(Please forward this email to a curator, please.)

I very much enjoyed my visit to the Slavery Museum yesterday afternoon, distantly some research for a poem I’m writing about blues music. [This is called 'Searching the Desert for the Blues', and I am currently revising it; there's a passage below.] I am also editing the poems of Mary Robinson, and so was interested in your feature on her Liverpool lover, Banastre Tarleton, an enthusiastic pro-slaver, right up to his death on the eve of abolition.

I’m glad he’s there, and I’m glad the feature reports his war career (today he would be classed as a war criminal). However, I was dismayed to see the unsubstantiated claim that he seduced Mary Robinson as a bet, and also that it referred to her by her nickname ‘Perdita’ (the part she played in a version of The Winter’s Tale which attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales, which led to their affair). Never have I seen the locution ‘Perdita Robinson’ (not even in the Gilray cartoons of the time). In fact, Mary was an abolitionist (later she was friends with William Godwin and other radicals). She also wrote about slavery in her poem ‘The Negro Girl’ and in her long political protest poem ‘The Progress of Liberty’. I intend to include both texts in my volume of her poems, and I attach my life of Robinson, [ that's also available here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 2: The Life of Mary Robinson (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)] and the texts for your perusal. If such information was added to the display, the complexities, ironies and contradictions of the pro- and anti- slavery positions would be more apparent. In your account, Mary appears as a pawn in Tarleton’s roguery, but in fact their relationship was long-lasting, and Mary was just as able to seduce him.

Yours faithfully

Robert Sheppard

Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Poetics

Edge Hill University

Here's an excerpt from 'The Progress of Liberty': 

Shall the poor AFRICAN, the passive slave,

Born in the bland effulgence of broad day,

Cherish’d by torrid splendours, while around

The plains prolific teem with honey’d stores

Of Afric’s burning soil; shall such a wretch

Sink prematurely to a grave obscure,

No tear to grace his ashes? Or suspire,

To wear submission’s long and goading chain,

To drink the tear, that down his swarthy cheek

Flows fast, to moisten his toil-fever’d lip,

Parch’d by the noontide blaze? Shall he endure

The frequent lash, the agonizing scourge,

The day of labour, and the night of pain;

Expose his naked limbs to burning gales;

Faint in the sun, and wither in the storm;

Traverse hot sands, imbibe the morbid breeze,

Wing’d with contagion, while his blister’d feet,

Scorch’d by the vertical and raging beam,

Pour the swift life-stream? Shall his frenzied eyes,

Oh! worst of mortal miseries! Behold

The darling of his soul, his sable love,

Selected from the trembling, timid throng

By the wan tyrant, whose licentious touch

Seals the dark fiat of the slave’s despair!

And here's a fragment of what I wrote after visiting the museum, from my poem about the blues:

…localities on maps, familiar names on a manifest, a portrait or two in postures of Attic tranquility, pro-saccarites on porcelain sugar bowls, sketches of woolybacks unloading Confederate bales, proclaim the guilty-elect of this city, no step now without a blue note to trip us…

Mary by Reynolds: looking like she knows how she'll be treated by history. Talking of 'treated', I have bought a novel about Robinson, which I've speed-read. It's by Freda Lightfoot and it is entitled Lady of Passion. Despite the title, it's historically accurate (which in a weird way is disappointing). There are three very good modern biographies, as well as Mary's own Memoirs. Listed in the bibliography that appends my life (see the link above). 

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

 

The Poems of Mary Robinson 6: Lines to Maria, MY Beloved Daughter (1793) - deselected & a note about notes

This post: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Selected Poems (History or Sleep) - the de-selected poems and the next Pages: Robert Sheppard: How I selected History or Sleep: Selected Poems talk about the problems of putting together my Selected Poems, History or Sleep, still available from Shearsman. There are different problems in selecting the work of another poet, and I talk about some of the problems I had with the poems of Paul Evans, whose selected, The Door at Taldir is also published by Shearsman: Pages: Paul Evans' Selected Poems and Lee Harwood's Collected (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) . 

Now I am selecting poems by Mary Robinson, and I’ve been sharing some thoughts as well as very rough drafts of texts for the book's intro in various posts beginning here, where you will find links to all the other posts: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). (Also for Shearsman!) Do have a look after reading this one. 

One poem has been removed from my list already. This I’d hoped to keep, partly because another selected Robinson doesn’t have this poem in it. I have read all of Robinson’s poems in her 1806 three volume Poems, only to select many of the poems also in the Judith Pascoe selected (see my bibliography), although I have distinct plans for the long political poem ‘The Progress of Liberty’, which is usually represented by the excerpts Mary Robinson published as separate poems. I also include two late elegiac poems at the end of the book, writing in illness and close to her death, which I've not seen elsewhere. 

Here’s the poem, lines to Robinson’s daughter (who remained loyal to her mother, and is partly responsible for collecting Robinson's work, ultimately, for us).  I thought it rather affective, but I think the theme of parenthood is covered more movingly in her ‘Lamentation for Marie Antoinette’ and in her poem on the birth of Coleridge’s son (Derwent, by the way). I don’t want the poem to completely disappear, so here it is. Its absence frees up space for more of ‘The Progress of Liberty’, which can only be a good thing, in terms of my appreciation of Robinson, and for the originality of my selection, which is the focus of this post.   

 Lines to Maria, my Beloved Daughter

Written on her Birth-Day, Oct. 18, 1793

 

To paint the lust’rous streaks of morn,

Along the pale horizon borne,

When from AURORA’S opening eye

Effulgent glory gilds the sky;

Or yet a softer theme to sing

Of purple evening’s humid wing;

To trace the crystal car of night

Along the plains of starry light,

Where the chaste Goddess bends her way,

Diffusing round a trembling ray; –

No more shall charm my pensive Muse,

With transient forms, or varying hues:

This hour my tenderer task shall be,

Sweet darling Maid, to sing of thee!

 

Attend my strain, and while I blend

The Guardian, Parent, Poet, Friend,

Believe, as each my verse shall prove,

A picture fraught with truth and love,

And every candid line impart

The feelings of a Mother’s heart!

 

Oh! form’d to soothe the wounds of Fate,

Dear solace of my mournful state!

Thou, only blessing Heav’n bestows

To shed meek Patience on my woes!

Know – that in life’s disast’rous scene,

Whate’er my chequer’d lot has been,

No hour was yet so dear to me

As that blest hour which gave me THEE!

 

From infant sweetness still I’ve trac’d

Thy mind, with ev’ry virtue grac’d;

Still have I mark’d Time’s ceaseless wing

Some new endearing treasure bring;

While Hope, soft-whisp’ring, bid me gaze

On bright’ning scenes of distant days’

When, more matur’d, these doating eyes

Should see the lovelier woman rise,

Adorn’d with all the modest grace

That beam’d about thy infant face;

Yet with a mind more passing fair

Than all that Nature pictur’d there!

 

With such a mind, so richly stor’d,

Still may’st thou live, admir’d, ador’d!

Through life enjoy the bliss divine

That waits on innocence like thine!

Still greet the morn with conscious smile,

With tranquil scenes the hours beguile;

And, when the busy day shall close,

Still find a couch of sweet repose!

 

For me, so long ordain’d to trace

O’er life’s dark wild a thorny space –

Still ev’ry sorrow doom’d to share,

Still shall my heart those sorrows bear,

Nor will I mourn at Fate’s decree,

If Heav’n, in pity, spares me THEE!

 

NOTE ABOUT NOTES: I've been writing the notes for the edition, and I won't detain anyone with details of this time-consuming and fiddly task, best done, I think, the way I did it, in a rush of activity. Now I've put the whole manuscript away for some weeks, perhaps for the summer. 

This editorial project came out of my own (mis)use of Robinson’s sonnets ‘Sappho and Phaon’ (the whole of it is in my selection) in my ‘English Strain’ project, which I explain here: Pages: My 'Tabitha and Thunderer' is published in Blackbox Manifold (robertsheppard.blogspot.com), and here, where you will also find lots of images relating to her life: Pages: My Transpositions of Mary Robinson's sonnets 'Tabitha and Thunderer' are now complete (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

June 10th: 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)

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 3 (possible contents)

[Here's the Mary Robinson hub-post, with more links than on this page: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)]

This is a bit of a niche post, being the long list for selection from Mary Robinson’s work for the ‘selected poems’ I’m working on. While I was typing it, it occurred to me that it seemed prudent to divide the book into three parts. (Though actually ‘Sappho and Phaon’ of itself  divides it into 3 parts, but this helps me think through periodisation, before and after, early and late, when that is only covering the period of Robinson's last decade of frenetic literary activity.) The poems are not particularly in order at the moment, within their parts, but I’ve adjusted it a little, so I'm getting there. I may even be there. I am also aware that this is ‘a long list’ in the sense that I might have to deselect some of these poems (even though I have a couple of reserves lined up too, should luck (space!) go the other way). I write about the problem of selection here:Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) . Below you will see the titles of poems, their positions in the three volumes I’m using (see bibliography) marked: volume/page number, and a rough year of writing or publication. I’ve erased a few notes to self.

Ode (epigram for title page): verse 1. 1/81 1788: this sums up quite a lot of her work.

I 

To Pope’s Oak 2.207 1791

Lines to Him who Will Understand Them 2.218 1788

Lines Inscribed to P. De Loutherbourg, Esq. R.A. 1.237 1791

From Ainsi Va Le Monde 1.15 1791 pp. 18 / 23-27

Marie Antoinette’s Lamentation in her Prison of the Temple 2.304 1791

Stanzas Written Between Dover and Calais, in July 1792. 2.321

Lines to Maria, My Beloved Daughter 2.277 1793 (this has been de-selected!) 

The Maniac (?) 2.298 1793

Stanzas to a Friend Who Wished to Have my Portrait 3. 303 1793 (1800 version?)

The Birth-Day 2.338 1795

 

II

Sappho and Phaon: In a series of Legitimate Sonnets (entire) 3.64 1796

 

III

Ode to the Snow-Drop 1.123 1797

Ode Inscribed to the Infant Son of S.T. Coleridge, Esq. 1.221 1800

To the Poet Coleridge 1.226 1800

The Haunted Beach 2.106 1800

The Savage of Aveyron 2.1. 1800 ish

The Negro Girl 2.170 1796 (Is that the date of the earlier version? Re-written for 1800/1806)

All Alone 2. 93 1800

Old Barnard: A Monkish Tale 2.100 1800

The Fortune Teller: A Gypsy Tale 3.153 1800

Deborah’s Parrot: A Village Tale 2. 155 1800 OR Mistress Gurton’s Cat: A Domestic Tale 2.127 1800 (two comic poems; I feel one would suffice).

The Alien Boy 3.177 1800

London’s Summer Morning 3.223 1800

The Poet’s Garrett 3.233 1800

Male Fashions for 1799 3.297

From The Progress of Liberty 3: 27-31/46-52 late 1790s.

Written on seeing a rose still blooming at a Cottage Door on Egham Hill, the 25^th of October, 1800. 2.225

To Spring: Written after a Winter of Ill Health in the Year 1800. 2, 368

[Bubbling below for inclusion in part III are Granny Grey and The Fugitive! to join other narrative poems above from Lyrical Tales (see image above), that is: The Negro Girl to The Alien Boy.]

 June 2024: See what I did choose, here:

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)

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)

My ‘Life’ of Mary Robinson may be read here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 2: The Life of Mary Robinson (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

This project came out of my own use of Robinson’s sonnets ‘Sappho and Phaon’ (now the whole of section II) for my ‘English Strain’ project, which I explain here: Pages: My 'Tabitha and Thunderer' is published in Blackbox Manifold (robertsheppard.blogspot.com), and here, where you will also find lots of images relating to her life: Pages: My Transpositions of Mary Robinson's sonnets 'Tabitha and Thunderer' are now complete (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

 

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Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com