Abstract
Without arguing for direct influence, this essay reads a group of English poems as an implicit Romantic conversation that advances different models of sapphic sublimity in a troplogical contest about the nature and place of female affinities. The essay begins by revisiting the exclusion of "Christabel" from the Lyrical Ballads, and goes on to discuss the implicit dialogue enacted through William Wordsworth's sonnet to the "Ladies of Llangollen" and Dorothy Wordsworth's poem "Irregular Verses." The essay concludes with a look at the metrical practices of these poems and of Shelley's "Rosalind and Helen," as a way to explore the ambivalences and ambiguities in Romantic configurations of female same-sex desire.