ABSTRACT
As soon as the first mutual declarations of love by Della Crusca and Anna Matilda appeared in the poetry sections of Bell's World in the summer of 1787, speculations were rampant as to who was hiding behind the fancy pseudonyms. When Hester Piozzi recommended the poems to her in a letter in early 1788, seward sent a vehement reply, inveighing against them and the newspaper in which they were published: 'But for your recommendation I should probably never have read them, being inserted in a magazine into which there is no looking without being shocked by some outrage or other against genius or worth'. Thus stripped of its formal idiosyncrasies, it developed into a genuine satirical tool that served as a broad metaphor for the kind of poetry that Gifford wished to attack, and helped to construct that poetry as marginal at the same time.
