Robert Browning

Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_poetry" title="English poetry" >English poet</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_drama" title="English drama" >playwright</a> whose mastery of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_monologue" title="Dramatic monologue" >dramatic monologue</a> made him one of the foremost <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_literature" title="Victorian literature" >Victorian poets</a>. His poems are known for their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony" title="Irony" >irony</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characterization" title="Characterization" >characterization</a>, dark humour, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_commentary" title="Social commentary" >social commentary</a>, historical <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setting_(narrative)" title="Setting (narrative)" >settings</a>, and challenging <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary" title="Vocabulary" >vocabulary</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax" title="Syntax" >syntax</a>.

Browning's early career began promisingly, but was not a success. The long poem Pauline brought him to the attention of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti" title="Dante Gabriel Rossetti" >Dante Gabriel Rossetti</a>, and was followed by Paracelsus, which was praised by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth" title="William Wordsworth" >Wordsworth</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens" title="Charles Dickens" >Dickens</a>, but in 1840 the difficult <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sordello_(poem)" title="Sordello (poem)" >Sordello</a>, which was seen as wilfully obscure, brought his poetry into disrepute. His reputation took more than a decade to recover, during which time he moved away from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley" title="Percy Bysshe Shelley" >Shelleyan</a> forms of his early period and developed a more personal style.

In 1846 Browning married the older poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning" title="Elizabeth Barrett Browning" >Elizabeth Barrett</a>, who at the time was considerably better known than himself. So started one of history's most famous literary marriages. They went to live in Italy, a country he called "my university", and which features frequently in his work. By the time of her death in 1861, he had published the crucial collection <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_and_Women_(poetry_collection)" title="Men and Women (poetry collection)" >Men and Women</a>. The collection <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatis_Personae" title="Dramatis Personae" >Dramatis Personae</a> and the book-length <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry" title="Epic poetry" >epic poem</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_and_the_Book" title="The Ring and the Book" >The Ring and the Book</a> followed, and made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation today rests largely on the poetry he wrote in this middle period.

When Browning died in 1889, he was regarded as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sage_writing" title="Sage writing" >sage</a> and philosopher-poet who through his writing had made contributions to Victorian social and political discourse – as in the poem <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliban_upon_Setebos" title="Caliban upon Setebos" >Caliban upon Setebos</a>, which some critics have seen as a comment on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_evolution" class="mw-redirect" title="Theory of evolution" >theory of evolution</a>, which had recently been put forward by Darwin and others. Unusually for a poet, societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive. Such <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browning_Society" title="Browning Society" >Browning Societies</a> remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century.

Browning's admirers have tended to temper their praise with reservations about the length and difficulty of his most ambitious poems, particularly The Ring and the Book. Nevertheless, they have included such eminent writers as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_James" title="Henry James" >Henry James</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde" title="Oscar Wilde" >Oscar Wilde</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw" title="George Bernard Shaw" >George Bernard Shaw</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.K.Chesterton" title="G. K. Chesterton" >G. K. Chesterton</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound" title="Ezra Pound" >Ezra Pound</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges" title="Jorge Luis Borges" >Jorge Luis Borges</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov" title="Vladimir Nabokov" >Vladimir Nabokov</a>. Among living writers, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King" title="Stephen King" >Stephen King</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower(series)" title="The Dark Tower (series)" >The Dark Tower</a> series and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.S.Byatt" class="mw-redirect" title="A.S. Byatt" >A.S. Byatt</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_(Byatt_novel)" title="Possession (Byatt novel)" >Possession</a> refer directly to Browning's work.

Today Browning's critically most esteemed poems include the monologues <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childe_Roland_to_the_Dark_Tower_Came" title="Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" >Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fra_Lippo_Lippi(poem)" title="Fra Lippo Lippi (poem)" >Fra Lippo Lippi</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Del_Sarto(poem)" class="mw-redirect" title="Andrea Del Sarto (poem)" >Andrea Del Sarto</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Last_Duchess" title="My Last Duchess" >My Last Duchess</a>. His most popular poems include <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria%27s_Lover" title="Porphyria's Lover" >Porphyria's Lover</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_They_Brought_the_Good_News_from_Ghent_to_Aix" title="How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" >How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diptych" title="Diptych" >diptych</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeting_at_Night" title="Meeting at Night" >Meeting at Night</a>, the patriotic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Thoughts_from_Abroad" title="Home Thoughts from Abroad" >Home Thoughts from Abroad</a>, and the children's poem <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin" class="mw-redirect" title="The Pied Piper of Hamelin" >The Pied Piper of Hamelin</a>. His abortive dinner-party recital of How They Brought The Good News was recorded on an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Records" title="Edison Records" >Edison</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder" title="Phonograph cylinder" >wax cylinder</a>, and is believed to be the oldest surviving recording made in the United Kingdom of a notable person.

Robert Browning

poems;

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poems/45662

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell, England. His mother was an accomplished pianist and a devout evangelical Christian. His father, who worked as a bank clerk, was also an artist, scholar, antiquarian, and collector of books and pictures. His rare book collection of more than 6,000 volumes included works in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. Much of Browning’s education came from his well-read father. It is believed that he was already proficient at reading and writing by the age of five. A bright and anxious student, Browning learned Latin, Greek, and French by the time he was fourteen. From fourteen to sixteen he was educated at home, attended to by various tutors in music, drawing, dancing, and horsemanship. 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 Browning a collection of Percy Bysshe 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, but he soon left, anxious to read and learn at his own pace. The random nature of his education later surfaced in his writing, leading to criticism of his poems’ obscurities.

In 1833, Browning anonymously published his first major published work, Pauline, and in 1840 he published Sordello, which was widely regarded as a failure. He also tried his hand at drama, but his plays, including Strafford, which ran for five nights in 1837, and the Bells and Pomegranates series, were for the most part unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the techniques he developed through his dramatic monologues—especially his use of diction, rhythm, and symbol—are regarded as his most important contribution to poetry, influencing such major poets of the twentieth century as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost.

After reading Elizabeth Barrett’s Poems (1844) and corresponding with her for a few months, Browning met her in 1845. They were married in 1846, against the wishes of Barrett’s father. The couple moved to Pisa and then Florence, where they continued to write. They had a son, Robert “Pen” Browning, in 1849, the same year his Collected Poems was published. Elizabeth inspired Robert’s collection of poems Men and Women (1855), which he dedicated to her. Now regarded as one of Browning’s best works, the book was received with little notice at the time; its author was then primarily known as Elizabeth Barrett’s husband.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in 1861, and Robert and Pen Browning soon moved to London. Browning went on to publish Dramatis Personae (1863), and The Ring and the Book (1868). The latter, based on a seventeenth-century Italian murder trial, received wide critical acclaim, finally earning a twilight of reknown and respect in Browning’s career. The Browning Society was founded while he still lived, in 1881, and he was awarded honorary degrees by Oxford University in 1882 and the University of Edinburgh in 1884. Robert Browning died on the same day that his final volume of verse, Asolando, was published, in 1889.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Asolando: Fancies and Facts (1889)

Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)

Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning (1895)

Dramatic Idyls (1879)

Dramatic Idyls: Second Series (1880)

Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884)

Jocoseria (1883)

La Saisiaz, and The Two Poets of Croisicv (1878)

Men and Women (1855)

New Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1914)

Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper, with Other Poems (1876)

Paracelsus (1835)

Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887)

Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)

Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or, Turf and Towers (1873)

Robert Browning: The Poems (1981)

Robert Browning: The Ring and the Book (1971)

Sordell (1840)

The Brownings to the Tennysons (1971)

The Complete Works of Robert Browning (1898)

The Inn Album (1875)

The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (1868)

The Ring and the Book (1868)

The Works of Robert Browning (1912)

Two Poems (1854)

Prose

Browning to His American Friends (1965)

Dearest Isa: Browning’s Letters to Isa Blagden (1951)

Learned Lady: Letters from Robert Browning to Mrs. Thomas FitzGerald 1876-1889 (1966)

Letters of Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J. Wise (1933)

New Letters of Robert Browning (1950)

Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed in Their Letters (1937)

The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, 1845-1846 (1969)

Thomas Jones, The Divine Order: Sermons (1884)

Anthology

The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877)

Drama

Aristophanes’ Apology (1875)

Balaustion’s Adventure, Including a Transcript from Euripides (1871)

Bells and Pomegranates, No. IV - The Return of the Druses: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1943)

Bells and Pomegranates. No. I - Pippa Passes (1841)

Bells and Pomegranates. No. II - King Victor and King Charles (1842)

Bells and Pomegranates. No. III - Dramatic Lyrics (1842)

Bells and Pomegranates. No. V - A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1843)

Bells and Pomegranates. No. V - Colombe’s Birthday: A Play in Five Acts (1844)

Bells and Pomegranates. No. VII - Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (1845)

Bells and Pomegranates. No. VIII - and Last, Luria; and A Soul’s Tragedy (1846)

Dramatis Personae (1864)

Fifine at the Fair (1872)

Poems: A New Edition (1849)

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871)

Strafford: An Historical Tragedy (1837)

Robert Browning

Attachments