Men and Women (poetry collection)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Men and Women is a collection of English poems published by Robert Browning in 1855. Although now generally regarded as featuring his best shorter pieces, the collection sold poorly and was not well received critically at the time.
[edit] Circumstances leading up to publication
Men and Women was Browning's first published work for five years, and his first collection of shorter poems since his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett in 1846. His reputation had still not recovered from the disastrous failure of Sordello fifteen years previously, and Browning was at the time comprehensively overshadowed by his wife in terms of both critical reception and commercial success. Away from the spotlight, Browning was able to work on a long-considered project. He had long been associated with the dramatic monologue, having written two early volumes of poems entitled Dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, but with Men and Women he took the concept a step further. The volume consists of fifty-one unrelated poems, all of which are monologues spoken by different narrators, some identified and some not; the first fifty take in a very diverse range of historical, religious or European situations, with the fifty-first - One Word More - featuring Browning himself as narrator and dedicated to his wife. The title of the collection came from a line in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Browning himself was very fond of the collection, referring to the poems as "My fifty men and women" (from the opening line in One Word More), and today it has been described as one of Victorian England's most significant books.
[edit] Poems in the collection
- Love Among the Ruins
- A Lover’s Quarrel
- Evelyn Hope
- Up at a Villa – Down in the City
- A Woman’s Last Word
- Fra Lippo Lippi
- A Toccata of Galuppi's
- By the Fire-Side
- Any Wife to Any Husband
- An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
- Mesmerism
- A Serenade at the Villa
- My Star
- Instans Tyrannus
- A Pretty Woman
- “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
- Respectability
- A Light Woman
- The Statue and the Bust
- Love in a Life
- Life in a Love
- How It Strikes a Contemporary
- The Last Ride Together
- The Patriot
- Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha
- Bishop Blougram’s Apology
- Memorabilia
- Andrea del Sarto
- Before
- After
- In Three Days
- In a Year
- Old Pictures in Florence
- In a Balcony
- Saul
- “De Gustibus—”
- Women and Roses
- Protus
- Holy-Cross Day
- The Guardian-Angel
- Cleon
- The Twins
- Popularity
- The Heretic’s Tragedy
- Two in the Campagna
- A Grammarian’s Funeral
- One Way of Love
- Another Way of Love
- "Transcendentalism - A Poem in Twelve Volumes"*
- Misconceptions
- One Word More
* This poem is not, in fact, twelve volumes long; rather, it is the title of a much longer, very pretentious (fictional) poem which is purportedly being discussed/criticised by Browning here.
