Robinson, Mary, Poetry

Critics have largely agreed in reading Mary Robinson as her public did: the literal body mapped onto the public persona, and both mapped onto and revealed through the published works. This privileging of the performative aspects of Robinson's public career is simultaneously dynamic (working the mobile and mutating interrelations between an ever-shifting persona, multiple personae, public behaviour, and publications as she made these available to a celebrity-hungry leisured class) and reductive (transforming her into a body to be read, as nothing more than the performance that is the text). In such a reading, her early ascent and the fast pace of her life are foreshortened into a fad as ephemeral as the fashionable behaviours she participated in – sensibility, Della Cruscanism, park parading, costuming. Although Robinson's social ascent was grounded in her multiply layered performances, projections of the identity she wanted others to buy literally and imaginatively, she was far more accomplished as a writer than the label of performance artist would imply, even if that label most accurately describes the arc of her career. The artistic output of her 42 years is prodigious, increasing in quantity as she needed income, but also in mastery. This entry will examine the development, range, and achievement of her poetry in order to show why both her readership and contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed her to be one of the major poets of the day.