Robert Browning

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Robert Browning
Robert Browning
For information about Robert X. Browning, Director of the C-SPAN archives, see Robert X. Browning.

Robert Browning (May 7, 1812 – December 12, 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.

Contents

[edit] Youth

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, England, on May 7, 1812, the first son of Robert and Sarah Wiedemann Browning. His father was a man of fine intellect and equally fine character, who worked as a well-paid clerk in the Bank of England and so managed to amass a library of around 6,000 books — many of them highly obscure and arcane. Thus Robert was raised in a household with good literary resources. Through his mother he inherited some musical talent, and composed settings for various songs. His grandmother was also of Creole blood. Thomas Chase wrote of Browning's dark comlplexion skin, and his curly hair. The same went for his Jamaican English born wife, Elizabeth Barrett.

[edit] Early career

A younger Robert Browning
A younger Robert Browning

In May 1833, Browning's Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession was published anonymously by Saunders and Otley. In many ways a vanity publication financed by his family, this marked the beginning of his career as a poet. A lengthy confessional poem, it was intended by its young author to be merely one of a series of works produced by various fictitious versions of himself (the poet, the composer, etc.), but Browning abandoned the larger project. He was much embarrassed by Pauline in later life, contributing a somewhat contrite preface to the 1868 edition of his Collected Poems asking for his readers' indulgence when reading what in his eyes was practically a piece of juvenilia, before undertaking extensive revisions to the poem in time for the 1888 edition, with the remark "twenty years' endurance of an eyesore seems long enough".

In 1834, he paid his first visit to Italy, in which so much of his future life was to be passed.

In 1835, Browning wrote the lengthy dramatic poem Paracelsus, essentially a series of monologues spoken by the Swiss doctor and alchemist Paracelsus and his friends. Published under Browning's own name, in an edition financed by his father, the poem was a small commercial and critical success and gained the notice of Carlyle, Wordsworth, and other men of letters, giving him a reputation as a poet of distinguished promise. Around this time the young poet was very much in demand in literary circles for his ready wit and flamboyant sense of style, and he embarked upon two ill-considered ventures: a series of plays for the theatre, all of which were dismally unsuccessful and none of which are much remembered today, and Sordello, a very lengthy poem in rhymed pentameter and loosely drawing upon a historical character who also (briefly) appears in Dante's Divine Comedy. Set against the backdrop of the conflict between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, Sordello was already difficult to understand for a Victorian audience that was accustomed to the annotation in historical fiction. Browning's syntax, style and - perhaps most of all - his plot made an already confusing subject virtually incomprehensible and the young poet became the butt of a number of satirical quips, such as Mrs. Carlyle's celebrated comment that she had read the entire thing through without being able to work out whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book. The effect on Browning's career was catastrophic, and he would not recover his good public standing — and the good sales that accompanied it — until the publication of The Ring and the Book nearly thirty years later.

Throughout the early 1840s he continued to publish volumes of plays and shorter poems, under the general series title Bells and Pomegranates. Although the plays, with the exception of Pippa Passes — in many ways more of a dramatic poem than an actual play — are almost entirely forgotten, the volumes of poetry (Dramatic Lyrics, first published in 1842, and 1845's Dramatic Romances and Lyrics) are often considered to be among the poet's best work, containing many of his most well-known poems. Though much admired now, the volumes were largely ignored at the time in the wake of the Sordello debacle.

[edit] Marriage and major monologues

Robert Browning married Elizabeth Barrett in 1846 after a courtship that lasted two years and gave rise to one of the most celebrated epistolary correspondences in literary history. Secretly married at Marylebone, the pair left England and eventually took up residence in Florence, Italy, where they lived what is generally considered to have been a very happy married life until Elizabeth's death in 1861. They had one son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (1849-1912), who was called "Pen."

During this period Elizabeth published several major works: most notably Casa Guidi Windows, a long poem, and Aurora Leigh, a verse novel. Robert published a volume of theological poetry - Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day - and wrote the two volumes on which his reputation was principally to rest during the Twentieth Century: Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864). In these collections, Browning included many of the finest examples of the dramatic monologue, a form of poetry of which he and Tennyson were the principal pioneers and that was to exert a significant influence upon such later poets as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Amongst the canonical examples of this form are such among Browning's monologues of this period as: "Andrea del Sarto", "Fra Lippo Lippi", "Bishop Blougram's Apology", "A Death in the Desert", "Caliban upon Setebos" and "Mr. Sludge, "The Medium"".

Although the period of his marriage was not a prolific one compared with Browning's youth or later life, it saw a steady rise in his reputation and produced some of his most enduring works.


[edit] Complete list of works

[citation needed]

[edit] Timeline

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • DeVane, William Clyde. A Browning handbook. 2nd. Ed. (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955)
  • Drew, Philip. The poetry of Robert Browning: A critical introduction. (Methuen, 1970)
  • Hudson, Gertrude Reese. Robert Browning's literary life from first work to masterpiece. (Texas, 1992)
  • Karlin, Daniel. The courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. (Oxford, 1985)
  • Kelley, Philip et al. (Eds.) The Brownings' correspondence. 15 vols. to date. (Wedgestone, 1984-) (Complete letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, so far to 1849.)
  • Maynard, John. Browning's youth. (Harvard Univ. Press, 1977)
  • Chesterton, G.K. Robert Browning (1903)

[edit] External links

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