The Unperishable Lustre of Mental Preeminence: Sensibility, Romanticism, and Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales

Thomas Gainsborough's 1781 portrait of Robinson, commissioned by the Prince of Wales. She holds a miniature of the Prince.

Introduction


From its establishment as a literary period through the retrospective lens of the Victorian Era, English Romanticism has been primarily identified with the Big Five, later Six, writers: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later Blake. But from the 1980s on, there has been a tremendous expansion in the attention paid to women writers of the period. This transformation in the canon is largely due to  the work of feminist critics like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Romanticists like Stuart Curran, who brought renewed attention to the work of such poets as Anna Letita Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Letita Elizabeth Landon, and Mary Robinson. Unquestionably it has been a positive step to open up the boundaries of the Romantic canon in this way. But it also leads to questions about what we accept as Romantic writing. Of course, most critics have long since accepted that Romanticism is a largely arbitrary idea. In his great attempt to develop an overarching criticism of the Romantics as a unified movement, M.H. Abrams failed to find room even for Byron. The dates given for the "beginning" and "end" of the period vary wildly (Should it be dated from the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads? Or perhaps the fall of the Bastille in 1792? Or as far back as 1760, to take into account the various forerunners of the canonical authors?). In any case, bringing these women writers into the canon only exacerbates such issues.

In his 1963 Fables of Identity, Northrop Frye introduced the idea of an "Age of Sensibility" immediately preceding the Romantic Period. In reaction to the neo-classicist aesthetic championed by Pope and Dr. Johnson, poets and novelists influenced by Rousseau and Locke produced works that glorified sentimentality and spontaneity. Frye warns against treating the work of this era as "pre-romantic," which would have "the peculiar demerit of committing us to anachronism before we start, and imposing a false teleology on everything we study. Not only did the 'pre-romantics' not know that the Romantic movement was going to succeed them, but there has probably never been a case on record of a poet's having regarded a later poet's work as the fulfillment of his own" (Frye 11). Frye's point is well-taken, but inevitably tends to fall by the wayside in the ways we discuss and teach late-nineteenth century literature. A few "poets of sensibility" are included in the Romantics volume of the Norton Anthology and a few of their poems are slipped into courses that still mainly focus on the Big Six. Articles tend to focus on the relations between the works of these writers and their male contemporaries or successors. Moreover, even when we accept necessarily reductionist constructions of literary history in order to render artificially neat "periods," poets like Blake, Smith, and Robinson remain standing on the threshold. 

The way to deal with these problems is to confront the "Romantic poet" as a construction emerging from a specific historical context and set of poetic principles and poses. While striving to avoid being trapped in the false narrative of progress which casts the poetry of sensibility as a mere stepping stone to Romanticism, I will argue that Mary Robinson worked to develop a public image of herself as a Romantic poet. The history of her reception exemplifies important problems in the ways scholars continue to think about and archive the period. I will focus mainly on Robinson's Lyrical Tales, the final work published in her lifetime, and one that operates within and demonstrates the slippage between "Romanticism" and the "literature of sensibility." Examining this work, and the context in which it was produced, allows us to explore how writers working in the late-eighteenth century constructed the poetic identity that we construe as Romantic.


Link to full text of Lyrical Tales through UC Davis' British Women Romantic Poets project

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility." Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.