ABSTRACT
The attempt to link Robinson and Southey was more than a marketing move. Stuart was a savvy businessman and hired poets because he admired their ability to generate the particular kind of poetry his readers enjoyed. Publication in the newspaper shaped the production and consumption of Southey's and Robinson's work connected them with each other, as in Stuart's advertisement, as Bristol poets and poets of the Post-the most popular antiministerial paper of the day. Southey and Robinson may have been poetic rivals, invested in uniquely shaping literary history; but they both shrewdly understood that "literature entangled with the desires of commercial enterprise". The newspaper offered a site for a new kind of poetry by a new generation, dependent on the literary marketplace to forge their poetic reputations. It built literary reputation by crafting relationships among writers that connected them aesthetically and economically—insuring good returns for poet and paper.
