Mary Robinson’s (Ir)rational Radicalism in The Progress of Liberty
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This essay argues that Mary Robinson’s last attempt at an epic, The Progress of Liberty (1801), reconfigures the generic conventions of the progress poem to stage a structural critique of the self-contradictory logic of the Enlightenment ideals. This reading moves beyond critical tendencies that have historically marginalized the text by focusing on the poet’s celebrity or reductively characterizing it as a mere anthem for Godwinian rationalism. Drawing on Steven Knapp’s theorization of sublime personification, the essay demonstrates the ways in which Robinson’s adoption of the Miltonic blank verse creates a fanatic agency of Liberty that inadvertently mirrors the logic of the Cult of Reason during the Reign of Terror. This grand allegorical frame is structurally negotiated against anecdotal vignettes of multifarious suffering individuals such as the Vestal, the Monk, and the Atheist. This collision exposes the structural limit where abstract Reason, having devolved into fanaticized ideology, confronts the irreducible realities of human suffering and is forced to stagger from its own inner contradiction. Ultimately, the essay contends that the poem breaks through this structural impasse not through utopian triumph of sustained somatic resolution, but through a structural compromise: Liberty is demoted to an object of “prattle,” and Reason is enshrined as the systemic mechanism of political control. The Progress of Liberty thus achieves political stability only by suppressing the radical freedom it initially sought to celebrate, demonstrating the profound complexity and political sophistication of Robinson’s final poetic project.
Abstract
This essay argues that Mary Robinson’s last attempt at an epic, The Progress of Liberty (1801), reconfigures the generic conventions of the progress poem to stage a structural critique of the self-contradictory logic of the Enlightenment ideals. This reading moves beyond critical tendencies that have historically marginalized the text by focusing on the poet’s celebrity or reductively characterizing it as a mere anthem for Godwinian rationalism. Drawing on Steven Knapp’s theorization of sublime personification, the essay demonstrates the ways in which Robinson’s adoption of the Miltonic blank verse creates a fanatic agency of Liberty that inadvertently mirrors the logic of the Cult of Reason during the Reign of Terror. This grand allegorical frame is structurally negotiated against anecdotal vignettes of multifarious suffering individuals such as the Vestal, the Monk, and the Atheist. This collision exposes the structural limit where abstract Reason, having devolved into fanaticized ideology, confronts the irreducible realities of human suffering and is forced to stagger from its own inner contradiction. Ultimately, the essay contends that the poem breaks through this structural impasse not through utopian triumph of sustained somatic resolution, but through a structural compromise: Liberty is demoted to an object of “prattle,” and Reason is enshrined as the systemic mechanism of political control. The Progress of Liberty thus achieves political stability only by suppressing the radical freedom it initially sought to celebrate, demonstrating the profound complexity and political sophistication of Robinson’s final poetic project.