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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 242 2 174 x 110 mm 96 pages
‘SAPPHO. Engraved for Mrs Robinson’s Sonnets, from a Marble Bust in the Palace of the Prince Giustiniani at Rome’ |
MARY ROBINSON Sappho and Phaon 1796 Sappho’s fatal love for Phaon, told by Ovid and put into English verse by Pope, is transformed by Mary Robinson into a narrative sonnet-sequence. It is an unusual and arresting use of the sonnet, made the more striking by her choice not of the usual Shakespearean form, with its final rhymed couplet, but of the Petrarchan version preferred by Milton. In Milton’s hands it was a majestic instrument. In Mary Robinson’s it becomes a sensuous, Keatsian vehicle for a poem of passion and power. £37.50 $65 When, in the gloomy mansion of the dead, |
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