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Browning, Robert, 1812-1889
from Literature Online biography
Published in Cambridge, 2002, by Chadwyck-Healey (a ProQuest Information and Learning Company)
Copyright ⓒ 2002 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All Rights Reserved.
Article Text:
Robert Browning was born on 7 May 1812, in Camberwell, south-east London. The son of Robert Browning and Sarah Anna Wiedermann, he was brought up with his only sister, Sarianna, who was two years his junior. His mother was an accomplished pianist and a devout evangelical Christian. His father, who worked as a clerk in the Bank of England, was also an artist, scholar, antiquarian and collector of books and pictures. Browning himself was well educated in an irregular fashion, being tutored variously at home and in local day schools. In the absence of a public school or university education, he drew heavily upon his father's excellent library. At the age of twelve he wrote a volume of Byronic verse entitled 'Incondita', which his parents attempted, unsuccessfully, to have published. In 1825 a cousin gave him a collection of Shelley's poetry; Browning was so taken with the book that he asked for the rest of Shelley's works for his thirteenth birthday and declared himself a vegetarian and an atheist in emulation of the poet. Despite this early passion, he apparently wrote no poems between the ages of thirteen and twenty. In 1828 Browning enrolled at the University of London (now University College, London) but he dropped out in his second term, anxious to read and learn at his own pace.
The verse of Shelley and Keats clearly influenced Browning's first published poem, Pauline , which appeared anonymously in 1833. Although the poem attracted little notice at the time, Browning sent a copy to W.J. Fox, who reviewed it favourably in his high-brow magazine The Monthly Repository . Fox was an unconventional and charismatic Unitarian Minister at the forefront of that movement's thinking in the first half of the nineteenth-century. While Browning himself was not a Unitarian, the early connection between the unconventional Fox and the spirit of theological enquiry seen in Browning's publications ought not to be overlooked. With Pauline , Browning established what was to be one of his central concerns: the authority (or otherwise) of his narrator's voice:
Pauline, come with me, see how I could build
A home for us, out of the world, in thought!
I am uplifted: fly with me, Pauline!
(ll. 729-731)
Here the imperative 'come with me' sits uneasily alongside the qualifying 'I could', undermining the reader's sense of the speaker's authority. Noting the first-person pronominal usage in these lines, John Stuart Mill commented that: 'If she existed and loved him, he treats her most ungenerously and unfeelingly.'
After a trip to St Petersburg in 1833-1834, Browning published 'Porphyria's Lover' and 'Johannes Agricola' anonymously in Fox's Monthly Repository . The narrators of both poems possess compelling voices, but it is important to grasp that Browning condones neither the antinomian bent of Johannes Agricola nor the murderous double standards of Porphyria's lover. The values of these poems are at odds with the values the reader is expected to bring to the text. Again, at an early stage in his career, Browning experiments with questions of narrative authority. In these two early characters he finds evidence of the 'Madhouse Cells', an explicatory heading given to a series of poems that included 'Porphyria's Lover' and 'Johannes Agricola', published in Browning's Dramatic Lyrics of 1842.
Following the trip to Russia, Browning undertook his first trip to Italy in 1834, forming an attachment to that country that was fully realised in his life there with Elizabeth Barrett , whom he married in 1846. 'Italy', he once wrote, 'was my university.' His second complete book, Paracelsus , appeared in 1835 under his own name, and Browning was always prepared to stand by this difficult work. Financed by his father, the poem brought him into contact with literary London for the first time. The setting of the poem in five parts indicates an interest in dramatic structure that Browning, shortly afterwards, pursued more fully. Paracelsus is clearly influenced by Shelley, Alastor in particular:
All is one day, one only step between
The outset and the end: one tyrant all-
Absorbing aim fills up the interspace,
One vast unbroken chain of thought,
(II, ll. 151-154)
Paracelsus strives for the specificity of 'one', but can only see in 'one' a token for 'everything': the poem slides into ambiguity as he is compelled to find in particular signs the tokens of universal truths. Paracelsus gained Browning admission into elevated literary circles in London, but not the wide audience and popularity he enjoyed later. While acquaintance with the likes of Thomas Carlyle , Francis Talfourd , Walter Savage Landor , Richard Horne , Barry Cornwall , Mary Mitford and Leigh Hunt may have been pleasing, it was friendship with Macready, the famous actor, that led to Browning's creation of three works for the stage: Strafford , first performed in 1837, A Blot on the 'Scutcheon in 1843 and Colombe's Birthday in 1853.
After Paracelsus , Browning's next significant poem was Sordello , first published in 1840. Sordello was poorly received: it is certainly a syntactically dense piece of writing, allusive and strained:
Who will, may hear Sordello's story told:
His story? Who believes me shall behold
The man, pursue his fortunes to the end,
Like me for as the friendless-people's friend
Spied from his hill-top once, despite the din
And dust of multitudes, Pentapolin
Named o' the Naked Arm, I single out
Sordello,
(I, ll. 1-8)
Throughout the poem, the couplet form strains against the metrical demands of Browning's writing. It was no mean feat to compose such a poem in couplets (albeit including rhymes such as 'stewed / rude'), and its difficult form demands close attention. The poem draws the reader's attention to the difficulty of ordering meaning: of putting a life-as-lived into the straightjacket of a text. Its subject matter concerns art's inability to represent human experience, and the dense verse reflects this ambitious theme.
Following the publication of Sordello , Browning's next project was the publication of a series of poems under the series title of Bells and Pomegranates . Browning wrote that, by the title, he meant 'something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought'. The title in fact alludes to the Bible, to Exodus XXXIX, where the calling of a priest is defined. Browning is fashioning himself not only as a poet, but as a poet with a calling. The poems in this collection were published initially as eight slim volumes between 1841 and 1846.
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett first met in the early summer of 1845 after Browning had written to her, impulsively, that January: 'I love your books, and I love you too.' Barrett was already well established as a poet in her own right, the more famous of the two at the time. Her father did not believe that she should marry, and their courtship was carried out in secrecy, founded on the exchange of passionate letters. On 12 September 1846 they married, in secret, and one week later they left the country, settling (after a tour of France and Italy) in Pisa. In 1847 they moved to Florence where, apart from a few excursions, they remained until the summer of 1851. Their son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, known as 'Pen', was born in March 1849.
In January 1849 a two-volume collected edition of Poems appeared containing 'Bells and Pomegranates' and Paracelsus ' and in 1850 Christmas Eve and Easter Day , an important collection for Browning, was published. In 'Christmas Eve' Browning addresses the question of faith: what it is, where it comes from, how it can help an individual to make sense of, or order, their world. Alongside and inseparable from this particular engagement with matters religious is Browning's engagement with the nature and force of poetry:
These people have really felt, no doubt,
A something, the motion they style the Call of them;
And this is their method of bringing about,
By a mechanism of words and tones,
(So many texts in so many groans)
A sort of reviving and reproducing,
More or less perfectly, (who can tell?)
The mood itself,
(ll. 240-7)
'Easter Day', opening with the donnish lines 'How very hard it is to be / A Christian!', engages fearlessly with Victorian anxieties about God's role in a changing culture. Browning again finds, in the role of the poet and the role of the speaking voice, a metaphor for a raft of sacred troubles:
While, if each human countenance
I meet in London day by day,
Be what I fear, -- my warnings fray
No one, and no one they convert,
And no one helps me to assert
How hard it is to really be
A Christian, and in vacancy
I pour this story!
(ll. 358-365)
The octosyllabic couplets hold together the speaker's unravelling faith: his certainty is formal, not maintained at the level of content. Yet it is in form, in the mouthing of words and the fashioning of sentences, that hope can be found. The ultimate fear, as expressed elsewhere in Browning's work, is silence or 'vacancy'.
At the end of July 1851 the Brownings returned to England, to be rejected again by Elizabeth Barrett's father, and to mingle successfully with the leading writers of the day. Around this time, Browning met, among others, Alfred Tennyson , who witnessed Browning's will, Dante Gabriel Rossetti , whose work Browning never really liked, and John Ruskin , whose writing greatly influenced the poet.
In November 1852, the Brownings returned to Italy, and it was here that Browning composed one of his most important collections, Men and Women which appeared in November 1855. The volume includes 'Love Among the Ruins', 'Fra Lippo Lippi', 'A Tocatta of Galuppi's', "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'", 'Bishop Bloughram's Apology', 'Andrea del Sarto', 'Saul', 'Cleon' and 'Two in the Campagna'. Men and Women is distinguished by an interest in history, particularly literary history. This emphasis is not surprising: Tennyson 's Idylls of the King and Sir Walter Scott 's historical romances were contemporary successes, blending history, myth and romance, while historians such as Thomas Carlyle and theorists of culture such as John Ruskin drew upon historical evidence in the construction of their accounts of civilisation and the arts. At the same time, Browning delivered in Men and Women a series of poems that engage fully with a variety of modes and forms of writing, from the pastoral of 'Love Among the Ruins' to the dramatic monologue of 'Fra Lippo Lippi'.
In 1856 the death of Browning's friend and mentor John Kenyon brought the Brownings an ￡11,000 legacy, ensuring their financial security. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was now experiencing ill health and, after a series of illnesses, she died in Browning's arms on 29 June 1861 in their Florentine apartments. Elizabeth's death can fairly be said to mark a turning point in Browning's career: deeply in love with his wife, he left Florence, never to return, and settled in London. In 1863 the three volumes of his Poetical Works appeared, followed in May 1864 by the important collection entitled Dramatis Personae . That volume contains many of Browning's best-known poems, including 'Rabbi Ben Ezra', 'A Death in the Desert', 'Caliban Upon Setebos', 'Confessions' and the virtuoso piece 'Mr Sludge, "The Medium"'.
1864, the year of the publication of Dramatis Personae , was significant in another way. In the autumn of that year Browning began work on his masterpiece The Ring and the Book , which appeared in serial form between November 1868 and February 1869. A poem of twelve books, it is a self-consciously epic poem, rivalling Tennyson 's Idylls of the King , which itself expanded from four to twelve books between 1859 and 1874, and Barrett Browning's lengthy novel-in-verse Aurora Leigh of 1857. The seed of The Ring and the Book was planted by Browning's purchase of the 'The Old Yellow Book' in Italy in 1860. 'The Old Yellow Book', containing the story of a seventeenth-century murder trial in Rome, prompted Browning to create a murder-mystery in verse, narrated from several distinct viewpoints. The text was a long time in gestation, and Browning worked on the project throughout the 1860s.
The twelve part structure of The Ring and the Book echoes the epics of Homer , Virgil , Dante , Spenser and Milton . At the same time, the length of the work and its serial publication was meant to compete with the popularity of the novel, much as his wife's Aurora Leigh had done. Browning's long poems following The Ring and the Book all share, to some extent, a sense of engagement with prose culture, featuring more-or-less complicated plots, narrative voices, thematic concerns and teasing resolutions. Such poems can also be understood, however, in terms of the long poems of Browning's Romantic forebears, for example Wordsworth 's The Excursion , Keats 's Hyperion and Byron 's Don Juan . Browning, then, sought to approach not only the epic, but the Romantic tradition of long philosophical verse, with his creation. The Ring and the Book deals with, transforms, and often undermines many of the features associated with the epic: heroism; the tussle between good and evil; the setting of contemporary concerns in the past; death and violence; elevated language; love; the quest; moral right and moral wrong. Above all, as a poem with twelve points of view, the poem is about judgement and the need to assimilate, comprehend and weigh different points of view. The final section of the poem contains a moving defence of Browning's art:
So, British Public, who may like me yet,
(Marry and amen!) learn one lesson hence
Of many which whatever lives should teach:
This lesson, that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.
Why take the artistic way to prove so much?
Because, it is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least.
. . .
But Art, -- wherein man nowise speaks to men,
Only to mankind, -- Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.
(ll. 831-840, 854-857)
Browning was somewhat disingenuous in his appeal to the British public: success came increasingly his in middle age. He had received an honorary MA from Oxford in 1867, and in the same year had been made an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. The Ring and the Book made Browning's name, moving quickly into a second edition.
Browning now entered one of the most productive periods of his career, and three notable poems appeared soon after The Ring and the Book : Balaustion's Adventure and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau in 1871, Fifine at the Fair in 1872. These three poems, and the metrical complexity of Fifine at the Fair in particular, represent something of a retreat from the certainties of The Ring and the Book . Browning's later work often deals with death, failure and moral uncertainty, and may be considered in the light of his wife's death. The final line of Fifine at the Fair is often taken to be an allusion to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: '"I end with -- Love is all and Death is naught!" quoth She.' During this productive decade Browning also published Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (May 1873), Aristophanes' Apology (April 1875), The Inn Album (November 1875), Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper (November 1875), a translation, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (October 1877), La Saisiaz: Two Poets of Croisic (May 1878) and Dramatic Idyls of April 1879. Browning attracted a host of honours from Britain's leading universities. He had been elected a life-governor of University College, London, in 1871, had been proposed for the lord-rectorship of St Andrew's University (in 1868 and 1877, refusing on both occasions on account of the likely expense) and at the University of Glasgow (1875, again declined). He was awarded an honorary LLD from Cambridge in 1879, and received a DCL from Oxford in 1882, adding an LLD from Edinburgh in 1884. Perhaps the best sign of his growing popularity was the establishment of the Browning Society in October 1881, an honour that embarrassed and flattered him in equal measure.
The 1880s saw the first real decline in Browning's astonishing rate of poetic production. Nevertheless, the decade leading to his death saw the appearance of a second series of Dramatic Idyls in June 1880, Jocoseria in March 1883, Ferishtah's Fancies in November 1884, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day in January 1887 and the appearance of the sixteen volume Poetical Works in the winter of 1888-1889. Browning's final publication, Asolando , appeared in December 1889. Now based in Venice, in November 1889 he wrote that 'I have caught a cold; I feel sadly asthmatic, scarcely fit to travel, but I hope for the best.' After a brief decline, he died at ten in the evening on 12 December 1889. He received a public funeral in Venice, after which his body was returned to England, where he was buried on 31 December 1889 in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Robert Browning's reputation has never been in serious doubt, although at times his poetry has been subject to stinging criticism. F.L. Lucas, responding with some difficulty to Browning's early poetry in Ten Victorian Poets , suggested that he had the 'conscience of a pavement artist . . . a natural impediment of thought that made it hard for him to construct even an intelligible telegram'. Lucas singled out Sordello for particular criticism: 'the reading of which after an illness reduced Douglas Jerrold to tears under the impression that he must really have lost his reason'. The difficulty of the early Sordello has long counted against Browning, but with The Ring and the Book and his many accomplished dramatic monologues, his reputation is secured.
A very useful and well-annotated edition of Browning's poetry is the two-volume Penguin English Poets publication, edited by John Pettigrew and supplemented by Thomas J. Collins (1981). It complements Richard D. Altick's 1971 edition of The Ring and the Book in the same series. The sixteen-volume Poetical Works of Robert Browning of 1888-89 is the standard copy text for most editions. The multi-volume 'Ohio' Browning, The Complete Works of Robert Browning , is useful, but its editorial principles have been the subject of criticism. The ongoing Longman Annotated Browning , currently being edited by Daniel Karlin and John Woolford, and the Oxford Browning , edited by Ian Jack et al both promise much. A useful bibliography is Robert Browning: A Bibliography, 1830-1950 , ed. Broughton, Northup and Pearsall (Cornell: 1953). There is an annual bibliography in Browning Institute Studies (1973-). Browning was a prolific letter writer: see Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson's 1978 Checklist . The courtship correspondence between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett was edited by Elvan Kintner.
There are several valuable biographical works, including J. Maynard's Browning's Youth (1977), Betty Miller's Robert Browning, A Portrait (1952), Donald Thomas's Robert Browning (1982) and Daniel Karlin's The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett (1985). Significant twentieth-century contributions to Browning criticism include Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (1957), a chapter on Browning in J. Hillis Miller's The Disappearance of God (1963) and Herbert Tucker's Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (1980). John Woolford's Browning the Revisionary and Joseph Bristow's Robert Browning (1991) are both useful. Harold Bloom has written extensively on Browning, in particular "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'". Also worthwhile are Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), his chapter entitled 'Browning: Good Moments and Ruined Quests' in Poetry and Repression (1976) and, with Adrienne Munich, Robert Browning: Twentieth-Century Views (1979). Mary Ellis Gibson's History and the Prism of Art: Browning's Poetic Experiments (1987) is particularly good on Browning's involvement with nineteenth-century historicism. The Ring and the Book is well served by criticism, the most notable being in Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations (1969) edited by Isobel Armstrong. The Journal Victorian Poetry frequently engages with The Ring and the Book , see in particular Adam Potkay's 'The Problem of Identity and the Grounds of Judgement in The Ring and the Book ' ( Victorian Poetry 25 [1987]). An interesting reading is offered by Ann P. Brady in Pompilia: A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning's 'The Ring and the Book' (1988). There has been much work on Browning's use of the dramatic monologue, in particular Warwick Slinn's response to Ann Wordsworth in Browning Society Notes (15:1, 1985).
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Browning, Robert, 1812-1889
from Literature Online biography
Published in Cambridge, 2002, by Chadwyck-Healey (a ProQuest Information and Learning Company)
Copyright ⓒ 2002 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All Rights Reserved.
Article Text:
Robert Browning was born on 7 May 1812, in Camberwell, south-east London. The son of Robert Browning and Sarah Anna Wiedermann, he was brought up with his only sister, Sarianna, who was two years his junior. His mother was an accomplished pianist and a devout evangelical Christian. His father, who worked as a clerk in the Bank of England, was also an artist, scholar, antiquarian and collector of books and pictures. Browning himself was well educated in an irregular fashion, being tutored variously at home and in local day schools. In the absence of a public school or university education, he drew heavily upon his father's excellent library. At the age of twelve he wrote a volume of Byronic verse entitled 'Incondita', which his parents attempted, unsuccessfully, to have published. In 1825 a cousin gave him a collection of Shelley's poetry; Browning was so taken with the book that he asked for the rest of Shelley's works for his thirteenth birthday and declared himself a vegetarian and an atheist in emulation of the poet. Despite this early passion, he apparently wrote no poems between the ages of thirteen and twenty. In 1828 Browning enrolled at the University of London (now University College, London) but he dropped out in his second term, anxious to read and learn at his own pace.
The verse of Shelley and Keats clearly influenced Browning's first published poem, Pauline , which appeared anonymously in 1833. Although the poem attracted little notice at the time, Browning sent a copy to W.J. Fox, who reviewed it favourably in his high-brow magazine The Monthly Repository . Fox was an unconventional and charismatic Unitarian Minister at the forefront of that movement's thinking in the first half of the nineteenth-century. While Browning himself was not a Unitarian, the early connection between the unconventional Fox and the spirit of theological enquiry seen in Browning's publications ought not to be overlooked. With Pauline , Browning established what was to be one of his central concerns: the authority (or otherwise) of his narrator's voice:
Pauline, come with me, see how I could build
A home for us, out of the world, in thought!
I am uplifted: fly with me, Pauline!
(ll. 729-731)
Here the imperative 'come with me' sits uneasily alongside the qualifying 'I could', undermining the reader's sense of the speaker's authority. Noting the first-person pronominal usage in these lines, John Stuart Mill commented that: 'If she existed and loved him, he treats her most ungenerously and unfeelingly.'
After a trip to St Petersburg in 1833-1834, Browning published 'Porphyria's Lover' and 'Johannes Agricola' anonymously in Fox's Monthly Repository . The narrators of both poems possess compelling voices, but it is important to grasp that Browning condones neither the antinomian bent of Johannes Agricola nor the murderous double standards of Porphyria's lover. The values of these poems are at odds with the values the reader is expected to bring to the text. Again, at an early stage in his career, Browning experiments with questions of narrative authority. In these two early characters he finds evidence of the 'Madhouse Cells', an explicatory heading given to a series of poems that included 'Porphyria's Lover' and 'Johannes Agricola', published in Browning's Dramatic Lyrics of 1842.
Following the trip to Russia, Browning undertook his first trip to Italy in 1834, forming an attachment to that country that was fully realised in his life there with Elizabeth Barrett , whom he married in 1846. 'Italy', he once wrote, 'was my university.' His second complete book, Paracelsus , appeared in 1835 under his own name, and Browning was always prepared to stand by this difficult work. Financed by his father, the poem brought him into contact with literary London for the first time. The setting of the poem in five parts indicates an interest in dramatic structure that Browning, shortly afterwards, pursued more fully. Paracelsus is clearly influenced by Shelley, Alastor in particular:
All is one day, one only step between
The outset and the end: one tyrant all-
Absorbing aim fills up the interspace,
One vast unbroken chain of thought,
(II, ll. 151-154)
Paracelsus strives for the specificity of 'one', but can only see in 'one' a token for 'everything': the poem slides into ambiguity as he is compelled to find in particular signs the tokens of universal truths. Paracelsus gained Browning admission into elevated literary circles in London, but not the wide audience and popularity he enjoyed later. While acquaintance with the likes of Thomas Carlyle , Francis Talfourd , Walter Savage Landor , Richard Horne , Barry Cornwall , Mary Mitford and Leigh Hunt may have been pleasing, it was friendship with Macready, the famous actor, that led to Browning's creation of three works for the stage: Strafford , first performed in 1837, A Blot on the 'Scutcheon in 1843 and Colombe's Birthday in 1853.
After Paracelsus , Browning's next significant poem was Sordello , first published in 1840. Sordello was poorly received: it is certainly a syntactically dense piece of writing, allusive and strained:
Who will, may hear Sordello's story told:
His story? Who believes me shall behold
The man, pursue his fortunes to the end,
Like me for as the friendless-people's friend
Spied from his hill-top once, despite the din
And dust of multitudes, Pentapolin
Named o' the Naked Arm, I single out
Sordello,
(I, ll. 1-8)
Throughout the poem, the couplet form strains against the metrical demands of Browning's writing. It was no mean feat to compose such a poem in couplets (albeit including rhymes such as 'stewed / rude'), and its difficult form demands close attention. The poem draws the reader's attention to the difficulty of ordering meaning: of putting a life-as-lived into the straightjacket of a text. Its subject matter concerns art's inability to represent human experience, and the dense verse reflects this ambitious theme.
Following the publication of Sordello , Browning's next project was the publication of a series of poems under the series title of Bells and Pomegranates . Browning wrote that, by the title, he meant 'something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought'. The title in fact alludes to the Bible, to Exodus XXXIX, where the calling of a priest is defined. Browning is fashioning himself not only as a poet, but as a poet with a calling. The poems in this collection were published initially as eight slim volumes between 1841 and 1846.
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett first met in the early summer of 1845 after Browning had written to her, impulsively, that January: 'I love your books, and I love you too.' Barrett was already well established as a poet in her own right, the more famous of the two at the time. Her father did not believe that she should marry, and their courtship was carried out in secrecy, founded on the exchange of passionate letters. On 12 September 1846 they married, in secret, and one week later they left the country, settling (after a tour of France and Italy) in Pisa. In 1847 they moved to Florence where, apart from a few excursions, they remained until the summer of 1851. Their son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, known as 'Pen', was born in March 1849.
In January 1849 a two-volume collected edition of Poems appeared containing 'Bells and Pomegranates' and Paracelsus ' and in 1850 Christmas Eve and Easter Day , an important collection for Browning, was published. In 'Christmas Eve' Browning addresses the question of faith: what it is, where it comes from, how it can help an individual to make sense of, or order, their world. Alongside and inseparable from this particular engagement with matters religious is Browning's engagement with the nature and force of poetry:
These people have really felt, no doubt,
A something, the motion they style the Call of them;
And this is their method of bringing about,
By a mechanism of words and tones,
(So many texts in so many groans)
A sort of reviving and reproducing,
More or less perfectly, (who can tell?)
The mood itself,
(ll. 240-7)
'Easter Day', opening with the donnish lines 'How very hard it is to be / A Christian!', engages fearlessly with Victorian anxieties about God's role in a changing culture. Browning again finds, in the role of the poet and the role of the speaking voice, a metaphor for a raft of sacred troubles:
While, if each human countenance
I meet in London day by day,
Be what I fear, -- my warnings fray
No one, and no one they convert,
And no one helps me to assert
How hard it is to really be
A Christian, and in vacancy
I pour this story!
(ll. 358-365)
The octosyllabic couplets hold together the speaker's unravelling faith: his certainty is formal, not maintained at the level of content. Yet it is in form, in the mouthing of words and the fashioning of sentences, that hope can be found. The ultimate fear, as expressed elsewhere in Browning's work, is silence or 'vacancy'.
At the end of July 1851 the Brownings returned to England, to be rejected again by Elizabeth Barrett's father, and to mingle successfully with the leading writers of the day. Around this time, Browning met, among others, Alfred Tennyson , who witnessed Browning's will, Dante Gabriel Rossetti , whose work Browning never really liked, and John Ruskin , whose writing greatly influenced the poet.
In November 1852, the Brownings returned to Italy, and it was here that Browning composed one of his most important collections, Men and Women which appeared in November 1855. The volume includes 'Love Among the Ruins', 'Fra Lippo Lippi', 'A Tocatta of Galuppi's', "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'", 'Bishop Bloughram's Apology', 'Andrea del Sarto', 'Saul', 'Cleon' and 'Two in the Campagna'. Men and Women is distinguished by an interest in history, particularly literary history. This emphasis is not surprising: Tennyson 's Idylls of the King and Sir Walter Scott 's historical romances were contemporary successes, blending history, myth and romance, while historians such as Thomas Carlyle and theorists of culture such as John Ruskin drew upon historical evidence in the construction of their accounts of civilisation and the arts. At the same time, Browning delivered in Men and Women a series of poems that engage fully with a variety of modes and forms of writing, from the pastoral of 'Love Among the Ruins' to the dramatic monologue of 'Fra Lippo Lippi'.
In 1856 the death of Browning's friend and mentor John Kenyon brought the Brownings an ￡11,000 legacy, ensuring their financial security. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was now experiencing ill health and, after a series of illnesses, she died in Browning's arms on 29 June 1861 in their Florentine apartments. Elizabeth's death can fairly be said to mark a turning point in Browning's career: deeply in love with his wife, he left Florence, never to return, and settled in London. In 1863 the three volumes of his Poetical Works appeared, followed in May 1864 by the important collection entitled Dramatis Personae . That volume contains many of Browning's best-known poems, including 'Rabbi Ben Ezra', 'A Death in the Desert', 'Caliban Upon Setebos', 'Confessions' and the virtuoso piece 'Mr Sludge, "The Medium"'.
1864, the year of the publication of Dramatis Personae , was significant in another way. In the autumn of that year Browning began work on his masterpiece The Ring and the Book , which appeared in serial form between November 1868 and February 1869. A poem of twelve books, it is a self-consciously epic poem, rivalling Tennyson 's Idylls of the King , which itself expanded from four to twelve books between 1859 and 1874, and Barrett Browning's lengthy novel-in-verse Aurora Leigh of 1857. The seed of The Ring and the Book was planted by Browning's purchase of the 'The Old Yellow Book' in Italy in 1860. 'The Old Yellow Book', containing the story of a seventeenth-century murder trial in Rome, prompted Browning to create a murder-mystery in verse, narrated from several distinct viewpoints. The text was a long time in gestation, and Browning worked on the project throughout the 1860s.
The twelve part structure of The Ring and the Book echoes the epics of Homer , Virgil , Dante , Spenser and Milton . At the same time, the length of the work and its serial publication was meant to compete with the popularity of the novel, much as his wife's Aurora Leigh had done. Browning's long poems following The Ring and the Book all share, to some extent, a sense of engagement with prose culture, featuring more-or-less complicated plots, narrative voices, thematic concerns and teasing resolutions. Such poems can also be understood, however, in terms of the long poems of Browning's Romantic forebears, for example Wordsworth 's The Excursion , Keats 's Hyperion and Byron 's Don Juan . Browning, then, sought to approach not only the epic, but the Romantic tradition of long philosophical verse, with his creation. The Ring and the Book deals with, transforms, and often undermines many of the features associated with the epic: heroism; the tussle between good and evil; the setting of contemporary concerns in the past; death and violence; elevated language; love; the quest; moral right and moral wrong. Above all, as a poem with twelve points of view, the poem is about judgement and the need to assimilate, comprehend and weigh different points of view. The final section of the poem contains a moving defence of Browning's art:
So, British Public, who may like me yet,
(Marry and amen!) learn one lesson hence
Of many which whatever lives should teach:
This lesson, that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.
Why take the artistic way to prove so much?
Because, it is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least.
. . .
But Art, -- wherein man nowise speaks to men,
Only to mankind, -- Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.
(ll. 831-840, 854-857)
Browning was somewhat disingenuous in his appeal to the British public: success came increasingly his in middle age. He had received an honorary MA from Oxford in 1867, and in the same year had been made an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. The Ring and the Book made Browning's name, moving quickly into a second edition.
Browning now entered one of the most productive periods of his career, and three notable poems appeared soon after The Ring and the Book : Balaustion's Adventure and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau in 1871, Fifine at the Fair in 1872. These three poems, and the metrical complexity of Fifine at the Fair in particular, represent something of a retreat from the certainties of The Ring and the Book . Browning's later work often deals with death, failure and moral uncertainty, and may be considered in the light of his wife's death. The final line of Fifine at the Fair is often taken to be an allusion to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: '"I end with -- Love is all and Death is naught!" quoth She.' During this productive decade Browning also published Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (May 1873), Aristophanes' Apology (April 1875), The Inn Album (November 1875), Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper (November 1875), a translation, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (October 1877), La Saisiaz: Two Poets of Croisic (May 1878) and Dramatic Idyls of April 1879. Browning attracted a host of honours from Britain's leading universities. He had been elected a life-governor of University College, London, in 1871, had been proposed for the lord-rectorship of St Andrew's University (in 1868 and 1877, refusing on both occasions on account of the likely expense) and at the University of Glasgow (1875, again declined). He was awarded an honorary LLD from Cambridge in 1879, and received a DCL from Oxford in 1882, adding an LLD from Edinburgh in 1884. Perhaps the best sign of his growing popularity was the establishment of the Browning Society in October 1881, an honour that embarrassed and flattered him in equal measure.
The 1880s saw the first real decline in Browning's astonishing rate of poetic production. Nevertheless, the decade leading to his death saw the appearance of a second series of Dramatic Idyls in June 1880, Jocoseria in March 1883, Ferishtah's Fancies in November 1884, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day in January 1887 and the appearance of the sixteen volume Poetical Works in the winter of 1888-1889. Browning's final publication, Asolando , appeared in December 1889. Now based in Venice, in November 1889 he wrote that 'I have caught a cold; I feel sadly asthmatic, scarcely fit to travel, but I hope for the best.' After a brief decline, he died at ten in the evening on 12 December 1889. He received a public funeral in Venice, after which his body was returned to England, where he was buried on 31 December 1889 in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Robert Browning's reputation has never been in serious doubt, although at times his poetry has been subject to stinging criticism. F.L. Lucas, responding with some difficulty to Browning's early poetry in Ten Victorian Poets , suggested that he had the 'conscience of a pavement artist . . . a natural impediment of thought that made it hard for him to construct even an intelligible telegram'. Lucas singled out Sordello for particular criticism: 'the reading of which after an illness reduced Douglas Jerrold to tears under the impression that he must really have lost his reason'. The difficulty of the early Sordello has long counted against Browning, but with The Ring and the Book and his many accomplished dramatic monologues, his reputation is secured.
A very useful and well-annotated edition of Browning's poetry is the two-volume Penguin English Poets publication, edited by John Pettigrew and supplemented by Thomas J. Collins (1981). It complements Richard D. Altick's 1971 edition of The Ring and the Book in the same series. The sixteen-volume Poetical Works of Robert Browning of 1888-89 is the standard copy text for most editions. The multi-volume 'Ohio' Browning, The Complete Works of Robert Browning , is useful, but its editorial principles have been the subject of criticism. The ongoing Longman Annotated Browning , currently being edited by Daniel Karlin and John Woolford, and the Oxford Browning , edited by Ian Jack et al both promise much. A useful bibliography is Robert Browning: A Bibliography, 1830-1950 , ed. Broughton, Northup and Pearsall (Cornell: 1953). There is an annual bibliography in Browning Institute Studies (1973-). Browning was a prolific letter writer: see Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson's 1978 Checklist . The courtship correspondence between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett was edited by Elvan Kintner.
There are several valuable biographical works, including J. Maynard's Browning's Youth (1977), Betty Miller's Robert Browning, A Portrait (1952), Donald Thomas's Robert Browning (1982) and Daniel Karlin's The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett (1985). Significant twentieth-century contributions to Browning criticism include Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (1957), a chapter on Browning in J. Hillis Miller's The Disappearance of God (1963) and Herbert Tucker's Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (1980). John Woolford's Browning the Revisionary and Joseph Bristow's Robert Browning (1991) are both useful. Harold Bloom has written extensively on Browning, in particular "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'". Also worthwhile are Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), his chapter entitled 'Browning: Good Moments and Ruined Quests' in Poetry and Repression (1976) and, with Adrienne Munich, Robert Browning: Twentieth-Century Views (1979). Mary Ellis Gibson's History and the Prism of Art: Browning's Poetic Experiments (1987) is particularly good on Browning's involvement with nineteenth-century historicism. The Ring and the Book is well served by criticism, the most notable being in Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations (1969) edited by Isobel Armstrong. The Journal Victorian Poetry frequently engages with The Ring and the Book , see in particular Adam Potkay's 'The Problem of Identity and the Grounds of Judgement in The Ring and the Book ' ( Victorian Poetry 25 [1987]). An interesting reading is offered by Ann P. Brady in Pompilia: A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning's 'The Ring and the Book' (1988). There has been much work on Browning's use of the dramatic monologue, in particular Warwick Slinn's response to Ann Wordsworth in Browning Society Notes (15:1, 1985).
HM , 2002
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