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Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets

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Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets More Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets Robert Browning by Todd K. Bender Other literary forms TABLE OF Robert Browning wrote letters copiously. Published volumes of his CONTENTS correspondence include The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Other literary forms Barrett, 1845-1846 (1926, 2 volumes; Robert B. Browning, editor), as well as Achievements volumes of correspondence between Browning and Alfred Domett, Isa Biography Blagden, and George Barrett. Baylor University holds extensive manuscript Analysis and document collections concerning Browning from which Intimate Glimpses “Porphyria’s Lover” from Browning’s Letter File: Selected from Letters in the Baylor University “My Last Duchess” Browning Collection was published in 1934. An additional collection of about “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s four hundred New Letters of Robert Browning has also been published (1950; Church” W. C. DeVane and Kenneth L. Knickerbocker, editors). “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” Robert Browning “Andrea del Sarto” (Library of Congress) “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” The Ring and the Book Bibliography For a short time, Browning also attempted to write plays. Unfortunately, the impracticality of performing his particular dramas on stage doomed them to failure. The majority of these works can be found in the Bells and Pomegranates series, published between 1841 and 1846. Achievements Robert Browning is, with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, one of the two leading Victorian poets. Although Browning did not invent the dramatic monologue, he expanded its possibilities for serious psychological and philosophical expression, and he will always be considered a master of the dramatic poem. Browning’s best poetry appears in three volumes: Men and Women, Dramatis Personae, and The Ring and the Book. Browning typically writes as if the poem were an utterance of a dramatic character, either a creation of his own imagination or his re-creation of some historical personage. He speaks through a mask, or dramatic persona, so that his poems must be read as little plays, or as scenes or fragments of larger dramas. The dramatic mask allowed him to create in his audience a conflict between sympathy and judgment: As the reader often judges the dramatic speaker to be evil, he nevertheless sympathizes with his predicament. The dramatic monologue allows the author to explore the thoughts and feelings of deviant psychology to an extent seldom practiced before. On the other hand, when the author always speaks through a character, taking on the limitations and prejudices of a dramatic figure, he conceals his own feelings and ideas from his reader. His critics charge that he evaded the writer’s most important duty by failing to pass judgment on his characters, and by presenting murderers, villains, and whores without a word of moral reprobation. He is accused of valuing passion for its own sake, failing to construct his own framework of values that would allow the reader to evaluate and judge the ethical position of his characters. Nevertheless, Browning deserves to be read as a serious innovator in poetic form; his conception of dramatic character influenced modern fiction as well as poetry. Biography Robert Browning was born in a London suburb, Camberwell, on May 7, 1812. His family could be characterized as comfortably middle class, politically liberal, and dissenting in religion. His father, a prosperous employee of the Bank of England, had collected a large private library. The family was dominated to some extent by the powerful personality of Browning’s mother, the former Sarah Anna Wiedemann from Dundee, who was deeply committed to the Congregational religion. At a time when Oxford and Cambridge were religious institutions, admitting only Anglican students, Browning attended the newly instituted University of London for a short time in 1828, but he did not complete a coherent course of study. Browning was largely self-taught, and like many autodidacts, he had difficulty appreciating how deeply learned he was and judging what his more conventionally educated audience would be likely to know. His poetry bristles with allusions and historical references that require a specialist’s explanation. As a boy, Browning showed remarkable enthusiasm for the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Such an admiration is particularly surprising in the light of their divergent beliefs. Shelley was antireligious, especially in his youth, and was in fact expelled from his university for publishing a pamphlet on the necessity of atheism, while Browning’s mother was firmly committed to a fundamentalist and emotional Christian belief. In any event, throughout his life, Browning depicted churchmen in an unfavorable light in his poems—a tendency that is perhaps understandable in a follower of Shelley, but one that suggests considerable tension between the mother and her son over religious matters. Shelley glorified the romantic rebel, as in his depiction of Prometheus, for example; Browning’s father, on the other hand, was employed by the Bank of England, and the family comfort depended on the stability and success of that existing order. Shelley’s extremely liberal ideas about politics and personal relationships must have been difficult to fit harmoniously into the boy’s comfortable, religious, suburban home life. In 1852, when Browning was forty years old, a collection of letters supposed to have been written by Shelley was published, and Browning was engaged to write the preface. The letters were discovered later to be spurious and the volume was withdrawn from publication, but Browning’s preface remains one of his most important explanations of his artistic theory. In the preface, Browning makes his famous distinction between “objective” and “subjective” writers, which can be imagined as the difference between the mirror and the lamp. An objective poet reflects or mirrors the outer world, making it clearer and easier to understand by writing about what takes place outside himself. The subjective poet, however, is like a lamp projecting from his inner flame a light by which the reader sees everything in a new way. Although the words “subjective” and “objective” seem to get hopelessly tangled as the argument proceeds, it appears that Browning views his dramatic characters as lamps, shedding their light on the world, allowing the reader to imagine the inner flame that produces such rays of fancy and imagination, shaping and distorting whatever they fall on. At the age of twenty, Browning published Pauline, which was to be the first step in a massive work projected to be the utterances of a series of characters distinct from the author himself. The work is in the tradition of Romantic confessional writing. John Stuart Mill wrote an unpublished review of Pauline, which eventually came to Browning’s attention, in which he accused the poet of having a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than he had ever before seen in a sane man. These cutting words are particularly ironic coming from the author of Mill’s Autobiography (1873), a totally self-conscious production. Nevertheless, Browning was stung by the criticism and in the future tried to hide his own identity, his personal self, ever more cleverly behind the mask of dramatic speakers. Pauline was followed by Paracelsus and Sordello. These three works all treat the predicament of an artist or seer at odds with his environment and his historical age. The phenomenon of alienation, estrangement from one’s own culture and time, is one of Browning’s repeated topics, as is the role of the artist and the artist’s relationship to society at large. Betty B. Miller in Robert Browning: A Portrait (1953) argues that there is a close identification between Browning and the central characters in these three works, so that Paracelsus is Browning, his garden at Wurzburg is identical to Browning’s garden at the family home in Camberwell, and so on. For about ten years, from 1837 to 1847, Browning devoted much of his energy to writing stage plays. These must be considered practical failures, although Strafford (pr., pb. 1837) ran for five performances on the professional stage with the famous tragedian William Charles Macready in the hero’s role. Browning had difficulty in treating external action, which is necessary in a staged performance, and turned instead to internal conflicts that were invisible to his audience. Although the plays simply did not work on stage, they were the workshop for the great dramatic monologues in Men and Women and Dramatis Personae. In 1845-1846 Browning courted the semi-invalid poet Elizabeth Barrett. They were married on September 12, 1846, and fled immediately to Italy. The popular imagination has clothed this romance in a gauze of sentimentality, so that Browning appears as a knight in shining armor rescuing his maiden from her ogre of a father. Even a cursory reading of the Browning-Barrett letters suggests that the romance was rather more complicated and contradictory. Miller’s Robert Browning suggests that Browning had a need to be dominated by a woman. His mother supplied that role until her death in 1840, and then he found her surrogate in Elizabeth Barrett, who was a considerably more famous writer than he was at the time. Miller points to places where Elizabeth simply took the controlling hand in their relationship and points to the nine-year period of silence between Men and Women and Dramatis Personae as the consequence of Elizabeth’s domination of Browning until her death on June 29, 1861. The truth is probably not so sinister as Miller thinks, nor so blissful as depicted in modern popular musicals such as Ron Grainer’s Robert and Elizabeth (1964). There appear to have been areas of gross disagreement between Elizabeth and Robert that would have been difficult to reconcile in day-to-day life. For example, Elizabeth, like Browning’s mother, believed in the spiritual world, while Browning distrusted those who made supernatural claims.
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