a d r i a n a c r ac i u n compulsory male heterosexuality demanded constant proofs of masculinity via the domination of women, which he documents in the sharp rise in domestic violence, prostitution, and illegitimacy throughout the eighteenth century The literary aggression toward women readers and writers expressed by canonical male poets, like their aggression against increasingly democratized reading publics, should be read, I suggest, as evidence of the vulnerability of masculine literary identities, as well as of feminine ones Unprecedented demands on behalf of the “rights of woman,” radicalized by the French Revolution, had further raised the stakes for all poets concerned with how poetic roles are sexualized and democratized (thus, for all poets) The 1793 Jacobin republic marked in some respects a high point for the legal rights of women and families, destined not to be regained until the twentieth century The short-lived Jacobin republic also marked the low point in gender relations according to counter-revolutionary ideologues like Hannah More and Jane West, as well as republican feminists like Helen Maria Williams More’s and West’s didactic poetry, fiction, and essays demonized the French as carriers of an infectious plague of Jacobin reforms, like women’s right to divorce, inheritance, and child custody Widely accessible to the working classes, broadside ballads like More’s popular “Sinful Sally” defended domestic sexual values for the poor against such revolutionary temptations With entirely different political intentions, Williams saw the Jacobin republic, which had ousted the bourgeois Girondins and banned women from public political clubs, as a dangerously masculine threat to what she idealized as a Revolution pursuing ideals seamlessly both middle-class and feminine Along with these ideological and “sexological” changes informing Romantic poetry came radical changes in print culture The end of perpetual copyright in 1774, new technologies like machine-made paper and stereotyping, and increasing access through circulating libraries and rising literacy, significantly expanded the number of Romantic-era publications and readers The resulting need for authors, especially poets, to grow more commercially and professionally astute had far-reaching implications for the content and form of the poetry produced The sales of single-author volumes of poetry peaked in 1820, and afterwards were increasingly priced out of the market by new media like gift books and annuals, and many more periodicals with increasingly distinct audiences Coleridge and Wordsworth, though they had begun their careers by publishing newspaper verse, ventured into the feminized terrain of the annual with considerable hand-wringing All of the canonical male poets’ impressive defenses of poetry’s cultural capital (a defining feature of Romantic print culture) could also be read as their defense of male poetic privilege under threat by a perceived deluge of scribbling women 160 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008