DOCSLIB.ORG

Robert Browning

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Robert Browning THE GREAT Robert POETS Browning POETRY Read by David Timson and Patience Tomlinson Robert Browning (1812–1889) Robert Browning was a romantic poet in great effect when disclosing a macabre or 1 How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix 3:49 every sense of the word. He was an ardent evil narrative, as in The Laboratory, or The 2 Life in a Love 1:11 lover who wooed the poet Elizabeth Confessional or Porphyria’s Lover. 3 A Light Woman 3:42 Barrett despite fierce opposition from Sometimes Browning uses this matter- 4 The Statue and the Bust 15:16 her tyrannical father, while as a poet – of-fact approach to reduce a momentous 5 My Last Duchess 3:53 inheriting the mantle of Wordsworth, occasion to the colloquial – in The 6 The Confessional 4:59 Keats and Shelley – he sought to show, Grammarian’s Funeral, for instance, in 7 A Grammarian’s Funeral 8:09 in the Romantic tradition, man’s struggle which a scholar has spent his life pursuing 8 The Pied Piper of Hamelin 7:24 with his own nature and the will of God. knowledge at the expense of actually 9 ‘You should have heard the Hamelin people…’ 8:22 But Browning was no mere imitator of enjoying life itself. As his body is taken to 10 The Lost Leader 2:24 a style of poetry that had been flourishing its last resting place high on a mountain 11 Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister 3:55 for the first 50 years of the 19th century. side, one of the pall-bearers, a former 12 The Laboratory 3:40 He was seeking to push back the student of the scholar, reflects on his 13 Porphyria’s Lover 3:47 boundaries of poetic expression, and in master’s achievements: 14 Evelyn Hope 3:49 some of his poems he seems to anticipate 15 Home Thoughts from Abroad 1:19 the poetic styles of the 20th century. He ‘That low man seeks a little thing to do, 16 Pippa’s Song 0:32 strives, for instance, for a conversational Sees it and does it; tone that at times seems quite modern, This high man, with a great thing to Total time: 76:20 using words that are appropriate to the pursue, = David Timson meaning of the poem, irrespective of the Dies ere he knows it.’ = Patience Tomlinson accepted poetic style of his day. To him, the idea mattered more than the form. He The scholar’s failure to succeed in life uses this technique of plain-speaking to is set against his effort to achieve his 2 3 vision. Striving to do one’s best, throwing undisguised bitterness in The Lost Leader. to the characters and did not represent his Browning creates a truthful character and caution aside and aiming high whatever Unlike the early Romantic poets, own views. For example, Song from Pippa leaves the reader to make a judgement on the consequences might be, meets with Browning sought not to be identified Passes is a lyric from a play that has often him, without any prompting from the poet. Browning’s approval here – though not in his poems as the narrator or moral been taken out of context and given as He presents the characters objectively – without a sense of irony – and is a constant voice. Wordsworth was autobiographical an example of Browning’s unbounded simply as Men and Women (as he called theme of his poems. In The Statue and in his poems, showing the effects of optimism. It shows the danger of viewing his 1855 collection of poems). the Bust, for instance, Browning pulls no the world, both natural and human, his work as a reflection of his life and views. In A Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister punches in criticising the Duke and his on his development as a poet, whereas In the play the words are used ironically to a bitter monk reveals his own arid reluctant lover for neglecting the effort Browning wanted to be objective rather show the naïve trust of the innocent Pippa and godless soul while musing on the necessary to gain ‘the prize’ – love – which than subjective, biographical rather than in the corrupt world of Ancient Rome. popularity and success of a fellow monk, ultimately passes the couple by: auto-biographical, and chose as a medium The monologues are amongst Browning’s Brother Lawrence. In trying to insinuate for his thoughts, characters who speak for most important work and are powerful that his rival is a bore, lecherous, irreligious ‘The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost themselves in a dramatic context. They dramatic expressions, which begs the and sycophantic, he in fact makes it clear Was the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin’ express their own thoughts unreservedly question as to why Browning’s plays, (A that Lawrence is blameless while he is and we can learn from them about their Blot on the Scutcheon etc) are so weak himself drawn to the supposed traits – Browning practised what he preached: past, their weaknesses and strengths, and consigned to oblivion. The answer he is a hypocrite hiding his vice behind a after winning the love of Elizabeth Barrett without the necessity of comment from is that though his sense of character and façade of piety. he defied her father and secretly eloped the poet. dramatic utterance was powerful, his Browning creates a character at once with her to Italy in 1846. An example of this is Dramatic sense of dramatic construction was not. entertaining and petty, corrupted by his In his choice of simple, everyday words Lyrics, Browning’s first collection of short His plays lack drive and tension. environment, while criticising the crippling Browning goes beyond Wordsworth’s poems (1842), which he describes in But such poems as My Last Duchess, effect a dull and monotonous monastic desire to write poetry using the language the preface as being: ‘For the most part Porphyria’s Lover, The Laboratory and existence can have, in time, on a man’s of the people and is not afraid sometimes lyric in expression, always dramatic in The Confessional are poetic and dramatic faith. to be vulgar. Wordsworth, though, would principle, and so many utterances of so masterpieces. They succeed because of The power of religion on people’s lives have scorned his choice of words as un- many imaginary persons, not mine.’ Note the tension created in the reader between is the theme also of The Confessional in poetic. But Browning had long since lost his final statement there: ‘not mine’. He the attractiveness of the speaker and the which a young girl’s emotional innocence faith with Wordsworth for his betrayal of maintained all his life that the thoughts simultaneous desire to make a moral is corrupted by an unscrupulous priest and the poetic vision, which he expresses with expressed in his dramatic poems belonged judgement. Like a good playwright, degraded from passionate love for her 4 5 man to passionate hate for the Church. already impressive collection of paintings infectious galloping rhythm, and The Pied ‘We do not believe that Browning’s The Laboratory also portrays a woman’s and bronzes. Chillingly, he tells the story Piper of Hamelin – written for children and works will survive except as a curiosity and love corrupted by the decadence and of ‘his last Duchess’ to the envoy from his based on a classic legend. These poems a puzzle’, wrote the Edinburgh Review in cynicism of the Ancien Regime. Potential next bride, so that she may be prepared to are uncomplicated in structure and theme, 1864, and to some, this well describes pleasure, attendance at a ball, is twisted behave in the manner he expects from his using simple language and abundant Browning’s place in English Literature. into bitter hate for her rival in love. The Duchess. energy. Browning can be challenging at times; style of the poem is melodramatic and Browning is often accused of being a That Browning was a passionate man he does not talk down to his readers, but grotesque. Browning was fascinated with difficult poet to understand, and despite cannot be doubted. Love was a great expects them to meet him half way. If one the grotesque, and Porphyria’s Lover, in his frequent use of colloquial words he force to him, ‘a prize’ to be striven for does, the rewards are more than worth which a young man muses on murdering does often express complicated thoughts and pursued in life at all costs. This is the the effort. his mistress after achieving a moment in an obscure way. He was much criticised theme of Life in a Love. The effort in itself of happiness with her, is quite Gothic in in his own day for this tendency, and testifies to a life well-lived. In Evelyn Hope Notes by David Timson tone. The poem’s original title, Madhouse was accused of using ‘verbal freaks’, he envisages a love that might have been, Cells, abandoned by Browning, would ‘archaisms’, and compound words of his despite a difference of years between the have reinforced this connection. own invention. speaker and the young girl, had not death In My Last Duchess the patrician Duke It’s true that Browning makes demands intervened. And that Browning didn’t just of Ferrara is a cold-hearted pragmatist who on his readers, sometimes generating mean spiritual love, but physical also, is places money, honour and a 900-year-old the need to reach for a dictionary. But embodied in the temptations expressed in name above everything, even the love of Browning assumes the reader is as learned A Light Woman in which a hopeless love an open-hearted young girl he once made as he; that he or she has a knowledge of affair between a friend and an unsuitable his Duchess.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • British Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Zea E-Books Zea E-Books 12-1-2019 British Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century Beverley Rilett University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Rilett, Beverley, "British Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century" (2019). Zea E-Books. 81. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/81 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Zea E-Books at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Zea E-Books by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. British Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century A Selection for College Students Edited by Beverley Park Rilett, PhD. CHARLOTTE SMITH WILLIAM BLAKE WILLIAM WORDSWORTH SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE GEORGE GORDON BYRON PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY JOHN KEATS ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING ALFRED TENNYSON ROBERT BROWNING EMILY BRONTË GEORGE ELIOT MATTHEW ARNOLD GEORGE MEREDITH DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI CHRISTINA ROSSETTI OSCAR WILDE MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE ZEA BOOKS LINCOLN, NEBRASKA ISBN 978-1-60962-163-6 DOI 10.32873/UNL.DC.ZEA.1096 British Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century A Selection for College Students Edited by Beverley Park Rilett, PhD. University of Nebraska —Lincoln Zea Books Lincoln, Nebraska Collection, notes, preface, and biographical sketches copyright © 2017 by Beverly Park Rilett. All poetry and images reproduced in this volume are in the public domain. ISBN: 978-1-60962-163-6 doi 10.32873/unl.dc.zea.1096 Cover image: The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse, 1888 Zea Books are published by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries.
    [Show full text]
  • Tony Roberts
    Tony Roberts Living with Browning: an appreciation of the poet in his bicentennial year I sometimes feel that Robert Browning and I were related, distant cousins perhaps. It stems from the ghostly intimacy of having read nine biographies of the man. His poetry and the books that feed on it have taken up five feet of my bookshelves for many years. Of course I frequently reread the poems, too, and quote Randall Jarrell in my defence. Celebrating Wallace Stevens’ work, in Poetry and the Age , Jarrell concluded: A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great. By that measure Robert Browning is a great poet. On my count there are a dozen or more lightning strikes among the thicket of collections written by this most relentless of Victorians i. What I have loved of Browning is the plain speaking, “hip to haunch”, intimacy of the dramas. We are there with the watch seizing “brother Lippo”; at dinner with the worldly prelate, Bishop Blougram; gathered with the sons at the deathbed of the bishop of Saint Praxed’s; attending on the dry, sadistic duke at Ferrara; eavesdropping on the cuckolded “faultless painter”. Here and elsewhere, Browning exhibits his genius for character and atmosphere – and for fine detail (“the ferrel of his stick/Trying the mortar’s temper ‘tween the chinks”), the perfect image ii , sensuality (upper iii and lower caste iv ), the memorable aphorism (“incentives come from the soul's self;/ The rest avail not.”) adroit rhythms and rhymes and – in lighter moments – a sometimes knockabout sense of humour v.
    [Show full text]
  • List of Poems Used in Literary Criticism Contests, 2009
    UIL Literary Criticism Poetry Selections 2021 William Wordsworth's "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known" Percy Bysshe Shelley "To Wordsworth" Mark Hoult's clerihew "[Edmund Clerihew Bentley]" unattributed clerihew "[Lady Gaga—]" 2021 A 2021 Richard Wilbur's "The Catch" William Wordsworth's "[Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes]" William Wordsworth's "She Dwelt among Untrodden Ways" Marge Piercy's "What's That Smell in the Kitchen?" Robert Browning's "Meeting at Night" Donald Justice's "Sonnet: The Poet at Seven" 2021 B 2021 William Wordsworth's "To Sleep" William Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray" William Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper" Richard Wilbur's "Boy at the Window" Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears" 2021 D 2021 Christina Rossetti's "Sleeping at Last" William Wordsworth's "[My heart leaps up when I behold]" William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" William Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us" John Keats's "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" Anthony Hecht's "The End of the Weekend" 2021 R 2021 Elizabeth Bishop's "Little Exercise" Billy Collins's "Dharma" William Wordsworth's "Expostulation and Reply" William Wordsworth's "Matthew" Charles Lamb's "The Old Familiar Faces" Louis Untermeyer's "The Victory of the Beet-Fields" 2021 S 2021 Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Bramha" Elinor Wylie's "Pretty Words" italics indicate that the poem is found in Part 4 UIL Literary Criticism Poetry Selections 2020 Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Song: To the Men of England" William Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 A Alanis Morissette's "Head over Feet" Mary Holtby's "Milk-cart" Emily Dickinson's "[A Bird came down the Walk]" 2020 Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" and Sheikh Sa'di's "[A Vision of the Sultan Mahmud]" Percy Bysshe Shelley's "England in 1819" Percy Bysshe Shelley's "One word is too often profaned" B William Shakespeare's Sonnet 2 John Updike's "Player Piano" 2020 Thomas Hardy's "Transformations" Percy Bysshe Shelley's "[Tell me thou Star, whose wings of light]" Percy Bysshe Shelley's "To Wordsworth" Percy Bysshe Shelley's "To Jane.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Browning (1812–1889) Robert Browning Was a Romantic Poet in Great Effect When Disclosing a Macabre Or Every Sense of the Word
    THE GREAT Robert POETS Browning POETRY Read by David Timson and Patience Tomlinson NA192212D 1 How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix 3:49 2 Life in a Love 1:11 3 A Light Woman 3:42 4 The Statue and the Bust 15:16 5 My Last Duchess 3:53 6 The Confessional 4:59 7 A Grammarian’s Funeral 8:09 8 The Pied Piper of Hamelin 7:24 9 ‘You should have heard the Hamelin people…’ 8:22 10 The Lost Leader 2:24 11 Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister 3:55 12 The Laboratory 3:40 13 Porphyria’s Lover 3:47 14 Evelyn Hope 3:49 15 Home Thoughts from Abroad 1:19 16 Pippa’s Song 0:32 Total time: 76:20 = David Timson = Patience Tomlinson 2 Robert Browning (1812–1889) Robert Browning was a romantic poet in great effect when disclosing a macabre or every sense of the word. He was an ardent evil narrative, as in The Laboratory, or The lover who wooed the poet Elizabeth Confessional or Porphyria’s Lover. Barrett despite fierce opposition from Sometimes Browning uses this matter- her tyrannical father, while as a poet – of-fact approach to reduce a momentous inheriting the mantle of Wordsworth, occasion to the colloquial – in The Keats and Shelley – he sought to show, Grammarian’s Funeral, for instance, in in the Romantic tradition, man’s struggle which a scholar has spent his life pursuing with his own nature and the will of God. knowledge at the expense of actually But Browning was no mere imitator of enjoying life itself.
    [Show full text]
  • Browning Once More*
    ·' BROWNING ONCE MORE* W. ]. ALEXANDER WHEN our President asked me to speak to the English Association on the present and future position of Browning's poetry, I conceived that the task imposed upon me was that of gathering the varying judgments of the critics of Browning in the publications of the first quarter of this twentieth century, of compar­ ing them with those current in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when Browning's reputation had reached its high-water mark, and of making some conjectures thence as to his permanent place in English literature. That I should find some falling off in reputation I took for granted, from the tendency of the present century to react against the ideas and art of the Victorian era .. A little investigation, however, showed me that I had a task much_ less straightforward and satisfactory. For I discovered that, at least during the last dozen years, there has been practically no evaluation of Browning's work either in periodicals or in more permanent publications; that, further, even in the earlier half of the first quarter of our century, not much appeared; and this was written by men who had already attained middle-age in the year 1900, so that it could not be accepted as expressing the ideas of the later era. I am therefore under the necessity of substituting for definite statements of contemporary criticism my own hazardous surmises as to the modern attitude towards Browning's poetry, and of the reasons why he has sunk in general estimation. That he has sunk, I infer not only from the general anti-Victorian tendencies of our day, and from the silence of the periodicals just alluded to, but also from various obiter dicta which have caught my attention in literature of recent years.
    [Show full text]
  • Browning's Shorter Poems
    ■> V;-^>i -4.^5 •*' 4. -'3k ^ ' Sj •, r,% •• ,*v i '? •-. * .*>... 4aoa Pts Cdpyi *>*» «* FT MEADE w f v?t GenCol1 * *_ . **/ A T J, •* . V’* "£* ‘<T. -;a: - ■•' * <1 rv-1 L Ti' k-v .^' y'v J? - -.." -- - - • • v.: ‘ \3:+j'Yk r > V ? ! ^ a5 K*“WfoV? ‘ £v 'W* h *.~*5 / 5 •> *' * V-i ■ /• *•..L,v -- .v ';.';• •} v 6, "S £ . 2 V ** ‘ , ):^:U . \ -V V . 3 *, 'V. ■'»“? •*: s* ;-;■ :-'^>. .y, • .* fe; « ;* * ‘ '•*> Class P K 4 £0 2. Boole ■ t COPYRIGHT DEPOSE \ Robert Browning From the Watts po trait. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery ■A. A. x TJ obert" BROWNINGS SHORTER POEMS SELECTED AND EDITED BY ROY L. FRENCH COMPILER AND EDITOR OF “ RECENT POETRY D. C. HEATH AND COMPANY BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO DALLAS LONDON HEATH’S GOLDEN KEY SERIES The following titles, among many others, are available or in preparation: POETRY Arnold’s sohrab and rustum and other poems browning’s shorter poems french’s recent poetry GUINDON AND o’keefe’s JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL POETRY .9 MILTON'S , SHORTER POEMS scott’s lady of the lake TENNYSON S IDYLLS OF THE KING ' F7Z FICTION C-'O Y ^ ^ cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS ELIOT S SILAS MARNER ELIOT’S MILL ON THE FLOSS HAWTHORNE S HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES TALES FROM HAWTHORNE dickens’s tale of two cities (entire) dickens’s tale of two cities {edited for rapid reading) scott’s ivanhoe SCOTT’S QUENTIN DURWARD WILLIAMS AND LIEBER’s PANORAMA OF THE SHORT STORY OTHER TITLES ADDISON AND STEELE’S SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY PAPERS *) boswell’s life of Johnson (selections) BURKE S ON CONCILIATION PHILLIPS AND GEISLER S GLIMPSES INTO THE WORLD OF SCIENCE LOWELL S A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION AND DEMOCRACY (with other essays on international good and bad will) macaulay’s Johnson FRENCH AND GODKIN’s OLD TESTAMENT NARRATIVES Shakespeare’s julius caesar Shakespeare’s midsummer night’s dream Copyright, 1929 By D.
    [Show full text]
  • 'B' Class: XI Topic: Meeting at Night Date: 02.07.2020 About the Po
    ST. LAWRENCE HIGH SCHOOL A JESUIT CHRISTIAN MINORITY INSTITUTION STUDY MATERIAL 4 Sub: ENGLISH ‘B’ Class: XI Topic: Meeting At Night Date: 02.07.2020 About the Poet: Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax. He is widely recognized as a master of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture. Browning wrote eight plays and fifty-one poems during his lifetime. He established his career first as a poet and then as a playwright. His works won global recognition marked by allusive imagery, symbolic structures, dramatic monologue, a blend of dark humour and irony. Browning successfully used dramatic monologue techniques which enabled the readers to see an event using the character’s lenses. Moreover, he explored the beauty of the real-world using artistic techniques in his poems. Some of his famous poems include My Last Duchess, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Porphyria’s Lover, Hilde Roland to the Dark Tower, The Lost Leader, Meeting at Night, Fra Lippo Lippi, and The Laboratory. Besides poetry, he tried his hands on plays. Some of them include Colombe’s Birthday, King Victor and King Charles, Pippa Passes and In a Balcony. Browning’s literary ideas have left deep imprints on English as well as international literature. His distinctive writing approach and unique way of expression made him stand among the best Victorian poets. His thoughtful ideas influenced many great poets and writers including Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and T.S.
    [Show full text]
  • R 0 B E R T B R 0 'V N I N G
    THE POETICAL \VORKS OF R 0 B E R T B R 0 'V N I N G VOLUME I. THE I ~ POETICAL \VORKS OF ::\OB,~ERT BROWNING WITH PORTRAITS IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE [AU n'gkls rmrvedj Printed by B.I.LLA!ITYllli:, HAliSOll t.' Co, At the Ballantyne Press ED I TOR'S NOTE. HIS edition of Mr. Browning's poems and plays makes no pretence to T be critical. One of the most useful of the Shakespearian commentators, Mr. Theobald, has observed that the science of criticism, so far as it affects an editor, is reduced to three classes: "The emendation of corrupt passages, the explanation of obscure and difficult ones, and an inquiry into the beauties a.-1 defects of composition." Happily there are no corrupt passages in _..,wning, but undoubtedly there are some obscure and difficult ones, although the reader will often be surprised to find how frequently obscurity and difficulty will be dissipated and removed by a careful study of the context. So, too, Browning has his beauties and defects of composition; but neither his beauties or defects of composition, nor the obscurities and difficulties of particular passages, are here discussed or explained. All that has been done is to prefix (within square brackets) to some of the plays and poems a few lines explanatory of the characters and events depicted and described, and to explain in the margin of the volumes the meaning of such words as might, if left unexplained, momentarily arrest the understanding of the reader.
    [Show full text]
  • Syllabus Cambridge International AS Level Language and Literature in English 8695
    Syllabus Cambridge International AS Level Language and Literature in English 8695 For examination in June and November 2021, 2022 and 2023. Version 2 Why choose Cambridge International? Cambridge Assessment International Education prepares school students for life, helping them develop an informed curiosity and a lasting passion for learning. We are part of the University of Cambridge. Our Cambridge Pathway gives students a clear path for educational success from age 5 to 19. Schools can shape the curriculum around how they want students to learn – with a wide range of subjects and flexible ways to offer them. It helps students discover new abilities and a wider world, and gives them the skills they need for life, so they can achieve at school, university and work. Our programmes and qualifications set the global standard for international education. They are created by subject experts, rooted in academic rigour and reflect the latest educational research. They provide a strong platform for students to progress from one stage to the next, and are well supported by teaching and learning resources. We review all our syllabuses regularly, so they reflect the latest research evidence and professional teaching practice – and take account of the different national contexts in which they are taught. We consult with teachers to help us design each syllabus around the needs of their learners. Consulting with leading universities has helped us make sure our syllabuses encourage students to master the key concepts in the subject and develop the skills necessary for success in higher education. Our mission is to provide educational benefit through provision of international programmes and qualifications for school education and to be the world leader in this field.
    [Show full text]
  • "Great 'Wlriters."
    "Great 'Wlriters." EDITED BY ERIC ROBERTSON AND FRANK T. MARZIj\LS. LIFE OF BRO WNING. ·tI. FpR FULL LIST OF THB VOLUMES IN TutS SERIES, SEE CATALOGUE AT END OF BOOK , Dhananjayarao Gadgil libraI'}' : L I ~ 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111 ~. GIPE-PUNE-002575 ' ROBERT BROWNI,NG RV WILLIAM SHARP. LONDON W.ALTER SCOTT, LIMITED PATERNOSTER SQUARE (A II rigkts reserved) ..l"J-­ o Ill/ 1~11l­ w C7 1-->( S- CONTENTS. - CHAPTER L PAOli London, ltobert Browning's birthplace; his. immediate pre· decessors and contemporaries in literature, art, and mnsic; born May 7th. 1812; origin or the Browning family; assertions as to its Semitic CODDection apparently gronnd. less; the poet a putative descendant or the Captain Micaiah Browning mentioned by Macanlay; Robert Browning's mbther or Scottish and German origin; his rather "a man of esceptional powen, artist, poet. critic:, student; Mr. Browning's opinion or his son's writings; the home in CambenreU; Robert Browning's childhood; concerning his optimism; his fondness for Canavaggio's "Andromeda and Perseus"; his poetic precocity; origin oJ "The Flight of the Duchess"; writes Byronic ver.;e; is sent to school at Peckham; his holiday afternoons; sees London by night, from Heme Hill; the significance of the spectacle to him· II CHAPTER IL iIe wishes to be a poet; writes in the style or Byron and Pope; the •• Death of Harold"; his poems, written wben twelve years old, shown to Miss Flower; the Rev. W. J. Fox's criticisms on them; "he comes aaoss Shelley's "Dzmon of the World"; Mrs. Browning procnres Shelley's poems, 4 CONTENTS.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Browning 1 Robert Browning
    Robert Browning 1 Robert Browning Robert Browning Robert Browning during his later years Born 7 May 1812 Camberwell, London, England Died 12 December 1889 (aged 77) Venice, Italy Occupation Poet Notable work(s) The Ring and the Book, Men and Women, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Porphyria's Lover, My Last Duchess Signature Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Early years Robert Browning was born in Camberwell - a district now forming part of the borough of Southwark in South London, England - the only son of Sarah Anna (née Wiedemann) and Robert Browning.[1][2] His father was a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England, earning about £150 per year.[3] Browning’s paternal grandfather was a wealthy slave owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies, but Browning's father was an abolitionist. Browning's father had been sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation, but revolted by the slavery there, he returned to England. Browning’s mother was a daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee, and his Scottish wife. Browning had one sister, Sarianna. Browning's paternal grandmother, Margaret Tittle, who had inherited a plantation in St Kitts, was rumoured within the family to have had some Jamaican mixed race ancestry. Author Julia Markus suggests St Kitts rather than Jamaica.[4][5] There is little evidence to support this rumour, and it seems to be merely an anecdotal family story.[6] Robert's father, a literary collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them rare.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Browning and Mick Imlah: Forming and Collecting the Dramatic Monologue
    Robert Browning and Mick Imlah: Forming and Collecting the Dramatic Monologue John Morton One could be forgiven for thinking that the young but very active field of neo-Victorian studies is exclusively concerned with fictional and filmed narratives. However, just as the poetry of the Victorian age resonates in the most unlikely of places, from films such as Hellboy 2 (2008) and Skyfall (2012), both of which feature readings from Tennyson, to the extract from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” reproduced on the wall of the London 2012 Olympic Village,1 so it endures in contemporary poetry, both in quotation but also in terms of form. Contemporary poets, not least Carol Ann Duffy, have returned in a general way to one of the poetical forms (if it can be termed a form) most associated with the Victorians, the dramatic monologue. The two poets I will focus on in this article Mick Imlah, along with the older Anthony Thwaite, neither of whom has had a great deal of academic attention paid to their work until now,2 come to the act of writing and collecting the Browningesque dramatic monologue from a standpoint which in recent years has been specifically defined as neo- Victorian by critics such as Ann Heilmann, Mark Llewellyn, and Marie-Luise Kohlke. In assessing their neo-Victorian returns to the composition and collection of dramatic monologues, I will consider their engagement with the nineteenth-century tradition of focusing such poems on marginal figures, while maintaining a sense of self-awareness at the artificiality of the form. I will briefly consider how the dramatic monologue affords Thwaite the opportunity to voice figures from the Victorian past who might have disappeared forever before moving on to a longer study of how Imlah follows this model at times but also expands it to consider the interrelation of England (often represented by Oxford) and Scotland, and their literary and intellectual heritage.
    [Show full text]