델라 크루스카니즘과 메리 로빈슨

Abstract

Despite the fact that Della Cruscanism was very popular in the late eighteenth century of England, literary critics have not accorded it much importance since it was blasted by William Gifford in The Baviad. The movement was initiated by Robert Merry and Hannah Cowley under the pen name of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda respectively. Merry and Cowley sent their playful love poems to each other in the newspaper The World. After some minor frictions over their ideas about poetry, they signed off and then Mary Robinson sent a love poem to Merry using the pen name of Laura. Della Cruscanism can be characterized by the emotional, spontaneous, improvisational, theatrical aspects of the correspondent’s aesthetics, but Robinson, although she praised and accepted Merry’s poetics, seems move beyond Della Cruscanism proper. Robinson wasthe author of Sappho and Phaon written in the form of the Petrarchan sonnetcycle, widely regardedas a masculine genre. In this work, she shows off her ability to accomplish he challenge of penning a love sonnet as a woman poet. Unlike the original work by Ovid, her work deals with the dilemma of relying on fancy and reason as poetic functions in solving human sufferings. Robinson attempts to tackle human problems in a serious way, unlike Cowley, who merely saw poetry as a playful platform for jokes and word games. Although some critics like Jerome McGann regard Cowley’s view as more sophisticated, this paper argues that Robinson shares Wordsworth’s poetics and deserves to be treated as a legitimate precursor of British Romanticism.