Robert Browning

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 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 publishDramatis 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. Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell (a suburb of London), the first child of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His mother was a fervent Evangelical and an accomplished pianist. Mr. Browning had angered his own father and forgone a fortune: the poet's grandfather had sent his son to oversee a West Indies sugar plantation, but the young man had found the institution of slavery so abhorrent that he gave up his prospects and returned home, to become a clerk in the Bank of England. On this very modest salary he was able to marry, raise a family, and to acquire a library of 6000 volumes. He was an exceedingly well­read man who could recreate the seige of Troy with the household chairs and tables for the benefit of his inquisitive son.

Indeed, most of the poet's education came at home. He was an extremely bright child and a voracious reader (he read through all fifty volumes of the Biographie Universelle ) and learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian by the time he was fourteen. He attended the University of London in 1828, the first year it opened, but left in discontent to pursue his own reading at his own pace. This somewhat idiosyncratic but extensive education has led to difficulties for his readers: he did not always realize how obscure were his references and allusions.

In the 1830s he met the actor William Macready and tried several times to write verse drama for the stage. At about the same time he began to discover that his real talents lay in taking a single character and allowing him to discover himself to us by revealing more of himself in his speeches than he suspects­the characteristics of the dramatic monologue. The reviews ofParacelsus (1835) had been mostly encouraging, but the difficulty and obscurity of his long poemSordello (1840) turned the critics against him, and for many years they continued to complain of obscurity even in his shorter, more accessible lyrics.

In 1845 he saw Elizabeth Barrett's Poems and contrived to meet her. Although she was an invalid and very much under the control of a domineering father, the two married in September 1846 and a few days later eloped to Italy, where they lived until her death in 1861. The years in Florence were among the happiest for both of them. Her love for him was demonstrated in the Sonnets from the Portugese, and to her he dedicated Men and Women, which contains his best poetry. Public sympathy for him after her death (she was a much more popular poet during their lifetimes) surely helped the critical reception of his Collected Poems (1862) and Dramatis Personae (1863). The Ring and the Book (1868­9), based on an "old yellow book" which told of a Roman murder and trial, finally won him considerable popularity. He and Tennyson were now mentioned together as the foremost poets of the age. Although he lived and wrote actively for another twenty years, the late '60s were the peak of his career. His influence continued to grow, however, and finally lead to the founding of the Browning Society in 1881. He died in 1889, on the same day that his final volume of verse, Asolando, was published. He is buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Robert Browning (1812-1889), English playwright and master of dramatic dialogue poetry wrote “A Death in the Desert”, “My Last Dutchess”, and “A Grammarian’s Funeral”;

That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it; This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one,— His hundred’s soon hit; This high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit. That has the world here—should he need the next, Let the world mind him! This throws himself on God, and unperplexed Seeking shall find him.

For many years Browning struggled to find his voice in the Victorian literary world.Charles Darwin had published his controversial theory of natural selection in The Origin of Species (1859) which was challenging orthodox beliefs; the world of religion, science, and art was in a state of change. Sometimes overshadowed by his wifeElizabeth Barrett Browning's success, Robert Browning produced collections of poetry and dramatic works for the stage, but it was not until his The Ring and The Book(published in four separate volumes between 1868 and 1869) that he finally gained financial and literary success. His profound contributions to the development of poetry through his psychological portraits and use of diction and rhythm however have long inspired poets into the twentieth century including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost.

Robert Browning was born on 7 May, 1812 in Camberwell, south-east London, England. He was the eldest child of Sarah Wiedemann, of German-Scottish descent, and Robert Browning, a wealthy clerk with the Bank of England who was also a scholar and collector of books; his massive library would be a great source of study for young Robert. Both his parents encouraged him to study and write; as early as the age of twelve Browning was writing poetry. In his literary pursuits, they would support him financially for many years. They also had a daughter, Sarianna, who would be devoted to her brother for the rest of her life.

Up to the age of sixteen Browning was tutored at home, learning French, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Italian, as well as studying music (his mother was an accomplished pianist), horsemanship and drawing. At the age of sixteen, he attended the University College in London but a year later left to pursue learning at his own pace. (He would later earn honorary degrees from Oxford and Edinburgh Universities, in 1882 and 1884 respectively). Browning was also studying natural history and the romantic poets like Lord George Gordon Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In 1833 Browning's Shelley-inspired confessional poem Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession was published anonymously by his family, though many years later he was embarrassed by its naïveté and noted“twenty years’ endurance of an eyesore seems long enough” when he revised it in 1888. In 1834 he traveled to Russia and made his first of many forays to Italy. Paracelsus (1835);

I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive,—what time, what circuit first, I ask not; but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In his good time.—Part i. was Browning’s next major effort, published under his own name this time. A series of poetical monologues between Swiss alchemist, physician, and occultist Paracelsus (1493-1541) and his friends, it was a promising critical success for Browning, praised by such men of letters as Thomas Carlyle and William Wordsworth.

It was a brief taste of acclaim however, for Browning’s next publications in his Bells and Pomegranates series, including the verse drama for the stage Strafford (1837), and his narrative poem Pippa Passes (1841), were largely ignored. Aldous Huxley would later sardonically use the lines from Pippa, “God's in his heaven, All's right in the world!”in Brave New World (1932). Browning's historical poem Sordello (1840) brought an onslaught of criticism that lasted for many years. Around this time Browning also met fellow playwright and author Charles Dickens.

Dramatic Lyrics (1842) includes “Porphyria’s Lover”;

The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listen'd with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneel'd and made the cheerless grate Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;

Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) was another collection of his poems that would only years later be considered among his finest. Other works published around this time were the plays A Blot in the `Scutcheon: A Tragedy (1843), The Return of the Druses (1843), and A Soul’s Tragedy (1846).

In 1846 Browning married fellow English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). They had started a now-famous correspondence a year earlier after Browning had read and admired her Poems (1844). “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,” —January 10, 1845. “I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart.” — January 11, 1845. The marriage was against her father’s wishes partly because he was so protective of Elizabeth and, since her teens she had suffered a lung ailment and treated as an invalid. Despite her frail health, the happy couple settled in Florence, Italy. They were devoted to each other, “for after their marriage they were never separated” writes their son in his introduction to The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846. Elizabeth’s health improved and she went on to write many highly acclaimed works. The few works Browning produced in the next fifteen years or so include Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850). Dedicated to his wife, Browning’s Men and Women (1855) includes a poem inspired by Edgar fromWilliam Shakespeare’s King Lear (and which later inspired Stephen King's Dark Towerseries), “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”;

If at his counsel I should turn aside Into that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly I did turn as he pointed, neither pride Now hope rekindling at the end descried, So much as gladness that some end might be.—III After the death of his beloved wife Elizabeth `Ba’ , he moved back to London to live with his son Robert “Pen” Barrett Browning (1849-1912). Embraced by London’s literary circle again, Browning’s Dramatis Personae (1864) was followed by The Ring and The Book. It is a blank verse poem consisting of twelve volumes and 21,000 lines. In various voices it narrates the 1698 trial of Count Guido Franceschini of Rome who murdered his wife Pompilia Comparini and her parents. It was a best selling work during Browning’s lifetime.

When his father died in 1866 Browning lived with his sister Sarianna. In the 1870’s he continued to focus on longer works including the poems Balaustion's Adventure (1871),Fifine At The Fair (1872), and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873). He also produced shorter collections including The Inn Album (1875) and Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper (1876) which includes thinly veiled attacks on his critics. His anthologyThe Agamemnon of Aeschylus was published in 1877.

In 1881 the Robert Browning Society was founded by enthusiasts in England and America. Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887) is Browning writing in his own voice, consisting of a series of dialogues with literary, artistic and historical figures. Asolando: Fancies and Facts (1889) was published the same day that Robert Browning died at his son’s home `Ca’ Rezzonico’ in Venice, Italy, on 12 December, 1889. His wishes were to be buried beside Elizabeth in the English Cemetery in Florence, but by that time it was closed to new burials, so he rests in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, London, England, nearby Poet Laureate Lord Alfred Tennyson.

In 1889, inventor Thomas Edison had recorded Browning reading “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”. In 1903 Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote his biography, Robert Browning.

Other Browning works include;

Poetry: Dramatic Idyls (1879), Dramatic Idyls: Second Series (1880), and Jocoseria (1883).

INTRODUCTION

Though Browning was eventually considered a premier Victorian poet, his critical reputation was hard won. Throughout his career, he honed the dramatic monologue, elevating the form to a new level. His experimentation with versification and with language, combined with the diversity and scope of his subject matter, forced Browning's critics to realize that this poet could not be evaluated by conventional literary standards. Particularly devoted to dramatic characterization, Browning explored the human psychology through his characters and the dramatic situations he presented. Modern critics are concerned with Browning's poetic development, with the themes that unite the various poems in a particular volume, and with the unique elements of Browning's innovative style.

Biographical Information

Born in Camberwell, a borough in southeast London, Browning was raised in a relatively affluent environment. His father was a well-read clerk for the Bank of England, and his mother was a strict Congregationalist. While Browning read widely as a boy, his formal education was somewhat irregular. Beginning in the early 1820s he attended the nearby Peckam School, where he studied for four years. Because Browning had not been raised as an Anglican, he was unable to attend the major English universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Instead, in 1828 he entered the recently-founded London University but terminated his studies after less than one year. Browning decided to pursue a career as a poet and lived in his parents' home, supported by them, until 1846. He published his first poem, Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession, anonymously in 1833. Browning continued writing and publishing and experimenting with the dramatic monologue until 1845, when he fell in love with Elizabeth Barrett. The pair secretly married in 1846, then departed for Italy where they settled in Florence and wrote until Elizabeth's death in 1861. Browning then returned to England, and after a period of literary inactivity, he began writing again. He remained highly prolific throughout the rest of his life. Browning died in 1889 while visiting his son in Venice. Browning's body was returned to England and buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Major Works

After the anonymous publication of Pauline, which Browning later insisted was a dramatic piece, many readers speculated that the sentiments expressed were the poet's own. In his next work, Paracelsus (1835), Browning established the objective framework offered by a more dramatic form and was thus able to distance himself from the characters in the poem. The dramatic monologue is based on the life of the Renaissance chemist Paracelsus, and the work received largely positive critical reviews. Browning then published Sordello in 1840, also based on a Renaissance subject, but the poem was less than favorably received by the critics, many of whom found it obscure and affected. In 1841, Browning began publishing a series of poems and dramas under the title Bells and Pomegranates. The final volume appeared in 1846 and failed to restore Browning's reputation among critics. In 1855, with the publication of Men and Women, containing Browning's well-known love poems and dramatic monologues, Browning began to receive the respect of some of his critics, although popular success still eluded him. It was not until the 1860s, and in particular the publication of Dramatis Personae in 1864, that Browning achieved major critical and popular success. The volume was followed shortly thereafter by his masterpiece, The Ring and the Book (1868-69). A series of dramatic monologues spoken by different characters, the work was based on an Italian murder case. The Ring and the Book cemented Browning's reputation as one of the foremost poets of Victorian England.

Critical Reception

Contemporary critical acclaim evaded Browning for many years. Gertrude Reese Hudson observes that the poet's critics required regular and frequent exposure to his unique dramatic method in order to recognize the excellence of Browning's art. Hudson also notes that other factors contributed to Browning's winning over of his critics, including their changing opinion regarding the nature of poetry, as well as a growing appreciation for both the timeliness of Browning's writing, his intellect and originality, and the "totality of his achievement."

Browning's highly individualized style and his usage of dramatic monologue fascinate modern scholars as much as these elements troubled his early critics. John Woolford and Daniel Karlin demonstrate that in using the dramatic monologue format, Browning was primarily interested in the creation and development of dramatic speakers and dramatic situations. The two critics also analyze Browning's style, finding that his poetry, in its focus on the speaker, insists on being read aloud. Woolford and Karlin further argue that Browning develops two distinct voices in his poetry, voices Browning himself described as "saying" and "singing" voices and which the critics contend result from the influence of the Romantics on Browning's work. In a separate essay, Daniel Karlin examines Browning's use of binary oppositions, finding that "every Browning poem is oppositional in nature." Karlin studies in particular the opposition between love and hate, maintaining that Browning explores hate not simply as the opposite of love, but as a force with its own purpose, a force which can lead to love as well as self-realization.

Other critics review certain volumes of Browning's poetry as a whole, arguing that the individual poems support a larger theme or purpose. Clyde de L. Ryals studies Browning's Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) with this in mind. Ryals stresses that the theme of loyalty unites the poems in this volume, and that this theme is often expressed in an ironic manner. Furthermore, Ryals argues that while the majority of the poems may concern national loyalties, the poems also explore other kinds of loyalties, including loyalty to one's self, to one's religion, and to one's beloved. Similarly, Adam Roberts argues for the unity of the poems in Browning's Men and Women (1855), asserting that the volume demonstrates Browning's first successful attempt at balancing the subjective and objective impulses in his poetry. This synthesis is achieved, Roberts argues, through Browning's characterization. Roberts explains that compared to the idiosyncratic, often insane characters in the earlier Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, the personalities in Men and Women, though complex, "communicate on something approaching our own level," and thus engender empathy and understanding among readers. Roberts goes on to discuss how Browning's continued usage of "grotesque" style and imagery (including colloquial language, rough syntax, and precise but blunt forms of expression) helps to link the form of these poems to their content.

Considerable critical discussion of Browning's work pertains to his murder mystery, The Ring and the Book. The twelve dramatic monologues, delivered by different characters, have led critics to question which, if any, of these characters serves as the moral authority, or center, of the poem. Adam Potkay argues against assigning this position of moral authority to any one of the characters and instead considers the poem as a "decentered struggle of interpretations" in which the character of Guido leads the way in "decentering" the poem by questioning the very conception of identity. W. David Shaw likewise contends that there is no central viewpoint in The Ring and the Book and maintains that while Browning ranks the authority of the characters in the poem, the poet creates no central authority figure. Additionally, Shaw explores the way in which deconstructionism and hermeneutics pervade Browning's masterwork, finding the Pope aligned with hermeneutical criticism and Guido and Tertium Quid aligned with the deconstructionists.

Browning’s most important poetic message regards the new conditions of urban living. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the once-rural British population had become centered in large cities, thanks to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. With so many people living in such close quarters, poverty, violence, and sex became part of everyday life. People felt fewer restrictions on their behavior, no longer facing the fear of non-acceptance that they had faced in smaller communities; people could act in total anonymity, without any monitoring by acquaintances or small-town busybodies. However, while the absence of family and community ties meant new-found personal independence, it also meant the loss of a social safety net. Thus for many city-dwellers, a sense of freedom mixed with a sense of insecurity. The mid-nineteenth century also saw the rapid growth of newspapers, which functioned not as the current-events journals of today but as scandal sheets, filled with stories of violence and carnality. Hurrying pedestrians, bustling shops, and brand-new goods filled the streets, and individuals had to take in millions of separate perceptions a minute. The resulting overstimulation led, according to many theorists, to a sort of numbness. Many writers now felt that in order to provoke an emotional reaction they had to compete with the turmoils and excitements of everyday life, had to shock their audience in ever more novel and sensational ways. Thus violence became a sort of aesthetic choice for many writers, among them Robert Browning. In many of his poems, violence, along with sex, becomes the symbol of the modern urban-dwelling condition. Many of Browning’s more disturbing poems, including “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess,” reflect this notion.

This apparent moral decay of Victorian society, coupled with an ebbing of interest in religion, led to a morally conservative backlash. So-called Victorian prudery arose as an attempt to rein in something that was seen as out- of-control, an attempt to bring things back to the way they once were. Thus everything came under moral scrutiny, even art and literature. Many of Browning’s poems, which often feature painters and other artists, try to work out the proper relationship between art and morality: Should art have a moral message? Can art be immoral? Are aesthetics and ethics inherently contradictory aims? These are all questions with which Browning’s poetry struggles. The new findings of science, most notably evolution, posed further challenges to traditional religious ideas, suggesting that empiricism—the careful recording of observable details—could serve as a more relevant basis for human endeavor, whether intellectual or artistic.

In exploring these issues of art and modernity, Browning uses the dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue, to paraphrase M.H. Abrams, is a poem with a speaker who is clearly separate from the poet, who speaks to an implied audience that, while silent, remains clearly present in the scene. (This implied audience distinguishes the dramatic monologue from the soliloquy—a form also used by Browning—in which the speaker does not address any specific listener, rather musing aloud to him or herself). The purpose of the monologue (and the soliloquy) is not so much to make a statement about its declared subject matter, but to develop the character of the speaker. For Browning, the genre provides a sort of play-space and an alternative persona with which he can explore sometimes controversial ideas. He often further distances himself by employing historical characters, particularly from the Italian Renaissance. During the Renaissance in Italy art assumed a new humanism and began to separate from religion; concentrations of social power reached an extreme. Thus this temporal setting gives Browning a good analogue for exploring issues of art and morality and for looking at the ways in which social power could be used (and misused: the Victorian period saw many moral pundits assume positions of social importance). Additionally, the monologue form allows Browning to explore forms of consciousness and self-representation. This aspect of the monologue underwent further development in the hands of some of Browning’s successors, among them Alfred Tennyson and T.S. Eliot.

Browning devotes much attention not only to creating a strong sense of character, but also to developing a high level of historic specificity and general detail. These concerns reflected Victorian society’s new emphasis on empiricism, and pointed the way towards the kind of intellectual verse that was to be written by the poets of high Modernism, like Eliot and Ezra Pound. In its scholarly detail and its connection to the past Browning’s work also implicitly considers the relationship of modern poets to a greater literary tradition. At least two of Browning’s finest dramatic monologues take their inspiration from moments in Shakespeare’s plays, and other poems consider the matter of one’s posterity and potential immortality as an artist. Because society had been changing so rapidly, Browning and his contemporaries could not be certain that the works of canonical artists like Shakespeare and Michelangelo would continue to have relevance in the emerging new world. Thus these writers worried over their own legacy as well. However, Browning’s poetry has lasted—perhaps precisely because of its very topical nature: its active engagement with the debates of its times, and the intelligent strategies with which it handles such era-specific material.

Themes

Multiple Perspectives on Single Events

The dramatic monologue verse form allowed Browning to explore and probe the minds of specific characters in specific places struggling with specific sets of circumstances. In The Ring and the Book, Browning tells a suspenseful story of murder using multiple voices, which give multiple perspectives and multiple versions of the same story. Dramatic monologues allow readers to enter into the minds of various characters and to see an event from that character’s perspective. Understanding the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of a character not only gives readers a sense of sympathy for the characters but also helps readers understand the multiplicity of perspectives that make up the truth. In effect, Browning’s work reminds readers that the nature of truth or reality fluctuates, depending on one’s perspective or view of the situation. Multiple perspectives illustrate the idea that no one sensibility or perspective sees the whole story and no two people see the same events in the same way. Browning further illustrated this idea by writing poems that work together as companion pieces, such as “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto.” Poems such as these show how people with different characters respond differently to similar situations, as well as depict how a time, place, and scenario can cause people with similar personalities to develop or change quite dramatically.

The Purposes of Art

Browning wrote many poems about artists and poets, including such dramatic monologues as “Pictor Ignotus” (1855) and “Fra Lippo Lippi.” Frequently, Browning would begin by thinking about an artist, an artwork, or a type of art that he admired or disliked. Then he would speculate on the character or artistic philosophy that would lead to such a success or failure. His dramatic monologues about artists attempt to capture some of this philosophizing because his characters speculate on the purposes of art. For instance, the speaker of “Fra Lippo Lippi” proposes that art heightens our powers of observation and helps us notice things about our own lives. According to some of these characters and poems, painting idealizes the beauty found in the real world, such as the radiance of a beloved’s smile. Sculpture and architecture can memorialize famous or important people, as in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” (1845) and “The Statue and the Bust” (1855). But art also helps its creators to make a living, and it thus has a purpose as pecuniary as creative, an idea explored in “Andrea del Sarto.”

The Relationship Between Art and Morality

Throughout his work, Browning tried to answer questions about an artist’s responsibilities and to describe the relationship between art and morality. He questioned whether artists had an obligation to be moral and whether artists should pass judgment on their characters and creations. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Browning populated his poems with evil people, who commit crimes and sins ranging from hatred to murder. The dramatic monologue format allowed Browning to maintain a great distance between himself and his creations: by channeling the voice of a character, Browning could explore evil without actually being evil himself. His characters served as personae that let him adopt different traits and tell stories about horrible situations. In “My Last Duchess,” the speaker gets away with his wife’s murder since neither his audience (in the poem) nor his creator judges or criticizes him. Instead, the responsibility of judging the character’s morality is left to readers, who find the duke of Ferrara a vicious, repugnant person even as he takes us on a tour of his art gallery.

Motifs

Medieval and Renaissance European Settings

Browning set many of his poems in medieval and Renaissance Europe, most often in Italy. He drew on his extensive knowledge of art, architecture, and history to fictionalize actual events, including a seventeenth-century murder in The Ring and the Book, and to channel the voices of actual historical figures, including a biblical scholar in medieval Spain in “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (1864) and the Renaissance painter in the eponymous “Andrea del Sarto.” The remoteness of the time period and location allowed Browning to critique and explore contemporary issues without fear of alienating his readers. Directly invoking contemporary issues might seem didactic and moralizing in a way that poems set in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries would not. For instance, the speaker of “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” is an Italian bishop during the late Renaissance. Through the speaker’s pompous, vain musings about monuments, Browning indirectly criticizes organized religion, including the Church of England, which was in a state of disarray at the time of the poem’s composition in the mid-nineteenth century. Psychological Portraits

Dramatic monologues feature a solitary speaker addressing at least one silent, usually unnamed person, and they provide interesting snapshots of the speakers and their personalities. Unlike soliloquies, in dramatic monologues the characters are always speaking directly to listeners. Browning’s characters are usually crafty, intelligent, argumentative, and capable of lying. Indeed, they often leave out more of a story than they actually tell. In order to fully understand the speakers and their psychologies, readers must carefully pay attention to word choice, to logical progression, and to the use of figures of speech, including any metaphors or analogies. For instance, the speaker of “My Last Duchess” essentially confesses to murdering his wife, even though he never expresses his guilt outright. Similarly, the speaker of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” inadvertently betrays his madness by confusing Latin prayers and by expressing his hate for a fellow friar with such vituperation and passion. Rather than state the speaker’s madness, Browning conveys it through both what the speaker says and how the speaker speaks.

Grotesque Images

Unlike other Victorian poets, Browning filled his poetry with images of ugliness, violence, and the bizarre. His contemporaries, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in contrast, mined the natural world for lovely images of beauty. Browning’s use of the grotesque links him to novelist Charles Dickens, who filled his fiction with people from all strata of society, including the aristocracy and the very poor. Like Dickens, Browning created characters who were capable of great evil. The early poem “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836) begins with the lover describing the arrival of Porphyria, then it quickly descends into a depiction of her murder at his hands. To make the image even more grotesque, the speaker strangles Porphyria with her own blond hair. Although “Fra Lippo Lippi” takes place during the Renaissance in Florence, at the height of its wealth and power, Browning sets the poem in a back alley beside a brothel, not in a palace or a garden. Browning was instrumental in helping readers and writers understand that poetry as an art form could handle subjects both lofty, such as religious splendor and idealized passion, and base, such as murder, hatred, and madness, subjects that had previously only been explored in novels.

Symbols

Taste

Browning’s interest in culture, including art and architecture, appears throughout his work in depictions of his characters’ aesthetic tastes. His characters’ preferences in art, music, and literature reveal important clues about their natures and moral worth. For instance, the duke of Ferrara, the speaker of “My Last Duchess,” concludes the poem by pointing out a statue he commissioned of Neptune taming a sea monster. The duke’s preference for this sculpture directly corresponds to the type of man he is—that is, the type of man who would have his wife killed but still stare lovingly and longingly at her portrait. Like Neptune, the duke wants to subdue and command all aspects of life, including his wife. Characters also express their tastes by the manner in which they describe art, people, or landscapes. Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance artist who speaks the poem “Andrea del Sarto,” repeatedly uses the adjectives gold and silver in his descriptions of paintings. His choice of words reinforces one of the major themes of the poem: the way he sold himself out. Listening to his monologue, we learn that he now makes commercial paintings to earn a commission, but he no longer creates what he considers to be real art. His desire for money has affected his aesthetic judgment, causing him to use monetary vocabulary to describe art objects.

Evil and Violence

Synonyms for, images of, and symbols of evil and violence abound in Browning’s poetry. “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” for example, begins with the speaker trying to articulate the sounds of his “heart’s abhorrence” (1) for a fellow friar. Later in the poem, the speaker invokes images of evil pirates and a man being banished to hell. The diction and images used by the speakers expresses their evil thoughts, as well as indicate their evil natures. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) portrays a nightmarish world of dead horses and war-torn landscapes. Yet another example of evil and violence comes in “Porphyria’s Lover,” in which the speaker sits contentedly alongside the corpse of Porphyria, whom he murdered by strangling her with her hair. Symbols of evil and violence allowed Browning to explore all aspects of human psychology, including the base and evil aspects that don’t normally appear in poetry.

Robert Browning, Tennyson's chief poetic contemporary, stands in striking artistic contrast to Tennyson--a contrast which perhaps serves to enhance the reputation of both. Browning's life, if not his poetry, must naturally be considered in connection with that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with whom he was united in what appears the most ideal marriage of two important writers in the history of literature.

In considering the poetry of Robert Browning the inevitable first general point is the nearly complete contrast with Tennyson. For the melody and exquisite beauty of phrase and description which make so large a part of Tennyson's charm, Browning cares very little; his chief merits as an artist lie mostly where Tennyson is least strong; and he is a much more independent and original thinker than Tennyson. This will become more evident in a survey of his main characteristics.

1. Browning is the most thoroughly vigorous and dramatic of all great poets who employ other forms than the actual drama. Of his hundreds of poems the great majority set before the reader a glimpse of actual life and human personalities--an action, a situation, characters, or a character--in the clearest and most vivid possible way. Sometimes the poem is a ringing narration of a fine exploit, like 'How They Brought the Good News'; sometimes it is quieter and more reflective. Whatever the style, however, in the great majority of cases Browning employs the form which without having actually invented it he developed into an instrument of thitherto unsuspected power, namely the dramatic monolog in which a character discusses his situation or life or some central part or incident, of it, under circumstances which reveal with wonderful completeness its significance and his own essential character. To portray and interpret life in this way, to give his readers a sudden vivid understanding of its main forces and conditions in representative moments, may be called the first obvious purpose, or perhaps rather instinct, of Browning and his poetry. The dramatic economy of space which he generally attains in his monologs is marvelous. In 'My Last Duchess' sixty lines suffice to etch into our memories with incredible completeness and clearness two striking characters, an interesting situation, and the whole of a life's tragedy. 2. Despite his power over external details it is in the human characters, as the really significant and permanent elements of life, that Browning is chiefly interested; indeed he once declared directly that the only thing that seemed to him worth while was the study of souls. The number and range of characters that he has portrayed are unprecedented, and so are the keenness, intenseness, and subtilety of the analysis. Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi, Cleon, Karshish, Balaustion, and many scores of others, make of his poems a great gallery of portraits unsurpassed in interest by those of any author whatever except Shakespeare. It is little qualification of his achievement to add that all his persons are somewhat colored by his own personality and point of view, or that in his later poetry he often splits hairs very ingeniously in his effort to understand and present sympathetically the motives of all characters, even the worst. These are merely some of the secondary aspects of his peculiar genius. Browning's favorite heroes and heroines, it should be added, are men and women much like himself, of strong will and decisive power of action, able to take the lead vigorously and unconventionally and to play controlling parts in the drama of life. 3. The frequent comparative difficulty of Browning's poetry arises in large part first from the subtilety of his thought and second from the obscurity of his subject-matter and his fondness for out-of-the-way characters. It is increased by his disregard of the difference between his own extraordinary mental power and agility on the one hand and on the other the capacity of the average person, a disregard which leads him to take much for granted that most readers are obliged to study out with no small amount of labor. Moreover Browning was hasty in composition, corrected his work little, if at all, and was downright careless in such details as sentence structure. But the difficulty arising from these various eccentricities occurs chiefly in his longer poems, and often serves mainly as a mental stimulus. Equally striking, perhaps, is his frequent grotesqueness in choice of subject and in treatment, which seems to result chiefly from his wish to portray the world as it actually is, keeping in close touch with genuine everyday reality; partly also from his instinct to break away from placid and fiberless conventionality. 4. Browning is decidedly one of those who hold the poet to be a teacher, and much, indeed most, of his poetry is occupied rather directly with the questions of religion and the deeper meanings of life. Taken all together, that is, his poetry constitutes a very extended statement of his philosophy of life. The foundation of his whole theory is a confident and aggressive optimism. He believes, partly on the basis of intellectual reasoning, but mainly on what seems to him the convincing testimony of instinct, that the universe is controlled by a loving God, who has made life primarily a thing of happiness for man. Man should accept life with gratitude and enjoy to the full all its possibilities. Evil exists only to demonstrate the value of Good and to develop character, which can be produced only by hard and sincere struggle. Unlike Tennyson, therefore, Browning has full confidence in present reality--he believes that life on earth is predominantly good. Nevertheless earthly life is evidently incomplete in itself, and the central law of existence is Progress, which gives assurance of a future life where man may develop the spiritual nature which on earth seems to have its beginning and distinguishes man from the brutes. This future life, however, is probably not one but many, a long succession of lives, the earlier ones not so very different, perhaps, from the present one on earth; and even the worst souls, commencing the next life, perhaps, as a result of their failure here, at a spiritual stage lower than the present one, must ultimately pass through all stages of the spiritual process, and come to stand with all the others near the perfection of God himself. This whole theory, which, because later thought has largely adopted it from Browning, seems much less original to-day than when he first propounded it, is stated and reiterated in his poems with a dynamic idealizing power which, whether or not one assents to it in details, renders it magnificently stimulating. It is rather fully expressed as a whole, in two of Browning's best known and finest poems, 'Rabbi ben Ezra,' and 'Abt Vogler.' Some critics, it should be added, however, feel that Browning is too often and too insistently a teacher in his poetry and that his art would have gained if he had introduced his philosophy much more incidentally. 5. In his social theory Browning differs not only from Tennyson but from the prevailing thought of his age, differs in that his emphasis is individualistic. Like all the other Victorians he dwells on the importance of individual devotion to the service of others, but he believes that the chief results of such effort must be in the development of the individual's character, not greatly in the actual betterment of the world. The world, indeed, as it appears to him, is a place of probation and we cannot expect ever to make it over very radically; the important thing is that the individual soul shall use it to help him on his 'lone way' to heaven. Browning, accordingly, takes almost no interest in the specific social and political questions of his day, a fact which certainly will not operate against the permanence of his fame. More detrimental, no doubt, aside from the actual faults which we have mentioned, will be his rather extravagant Romanticism--the vehemence of his passion and his insistence on the supreme value of emotion. With these characteristics classically minded critics have always been highly impatient, and they will no doubt prevent him from ultimately taking a place beside Shakespeare and the serene Milton; but they will not seriously interfere, we may be certain, with his recognition as one of the very great English poets.

The Romantic period was shaped by a multitude of political, social, and economic changes. Many writers of the period were aware of a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which some called “the spirit of the age.” This spirit was linked to both the politics of the French Revolution and religious apocalypticism… The final defeat of the French emperor Napoleon in 1815 ushered in a period of harsh, repressive measures in England… Wordsworth and Coleridge’s sense of the emancipatory opportunities brought in by the new historical moment was expressed in their Lyrical Ballads (1798), which revolutionized the theory and practice of poetry. Wordsworth influentially located the source of a poem not in outer nature but in the psychology and emotions of the individual poet. In keeping with the view that poetry emphasizes the poet’s feelings, the lyric became a major Romantic form. (The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Romanticism) [4]

The Victorian era was a period of dramatic change that brought England to its highest point of development as a world power... England experienced an enormous increase in wealth, but rapid and unregulated industrialization brought a host of social and economic problems… The Church of England had evolved into three major divisions, with conflicting beliefs about religious practice. There were also rationalist challenges to religion from philosophy (especially Utilitarianism) and science (especially biology and geology)… Literacy increased significantly in the period… Victorian novels seek to represent a large and comprehensive social world, constructing a tension between social conditions and the aspirations of the hero or heroine. Writing in the shadow of Romanticism, the Victorians developed a poetry of mood and character. Victorian poetry tends to be pictorial, and often uses sound to convey meaning. (The Norton Anthology Of English Literature. Victorian Era) .[5]

This analysis will try to find out those differences, but also to find the point of connection between those literary periods. And with this purpose, we have taken as examples the poem “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron and “A Pretty Woman” by Robert Browning; both of them with a similar topic, the feminine beauty.

On the one hand we have Lord Byron. We know that Lord Byron’s life and actions were considered as scandalous by the society of his time because of Byron’s sense of freedom and individuality. He, like the rest of the romantic poets, didn’t feel comfortable with his society; however, he had a hate-love relationship with his readers. His poems and his own life were considered as immoral because readers used to identify him with the gloomy and attractive man of his texts; but for the same reason, he looked as a person who needed to be saved.[6] That personality of misunderstood and solitary man who, at the same time showed in this poems the “capacity for devotion, tenderness, and ruthless as well as an elevated quality of friendship”, turned him in some kind of hero. Indeed, his poetical corpus is made of “extreme” poems. “These extremes are stylistic, erotic, satirical, or the puffery of the sublime…comedy and the frantic melancholy and despair of the Romantic.”[7]

“She Walks in Beauty” belongs to those tender poems written by Lord Byron in his ‘sublime’ moments, where the beauty of a lady can be gracefully compared to heaven’s magnificence.

On the other hand, Robert Browning was a well-accepted and adapted man of his era; someone who, like the most of the Victorian writers, “achieved rapprochement with their audience by compromising with the middle-class morality of the time”. [8] But in this case, his involvement in the culture and moral costumes of his time gave a stronger intentionality to his works. That happened because, to avoid being recognized in his poems, he used to give an ‘objective’ voice to his characters surrounding them by a recognizable background of his time and reflecting a huge variety of behaviours. In that way, readers didn’t identify those words and actions with the poet. The poems were taken as mere lyric and as well, judged it by its content.[9]

The advertisement to the original Dramatic Lyrics in 1842 declares: "Such poems as the following come properly enough, I suppose, under the head of 'Dramatic Pieces;' being, though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine."( The Victorian Web. Books. The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry By E. D. Johnson ) [10]

Those dramatic monologues can be understood as a covered way to reflect the poet's opposition to existing values.

“A Pretty Woman” is a good example of this, because it is impossible to affirm that it is Browning himself who is talking or if it is just another character giving his opinion about women.

Internet Pages

About.com. Classic Literature. Collected Work by Robert Browning. http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rbrowning/bl-rbrown-pretty.htm

Bartleby. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900. http://www.bartleby.com/101/600.html

BBC Web Page. Arts. The Romantics. Byron http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/byron.shtml

English History Net. Byron. Contemporary and Critical Opinion of Lord Byron

http://englishhistory.net/byron/critical. html

English Romantics. Poems by Blake and other Romantics. http://www.englishromantics.com/rom_analyses4.htm#beauty

Ezine Articles. She Walks in Beauty. A Discussion of the Poem by Lord Byron. http://ezinearticles.com/?She-Walks-In-Beauty,-A-Discussion-of-the-Poem-by-Lord- Byron&id=80761

Knowledgerush. Books. Robert Browning: How to Know Him by William Lyon Phelps http://www.knowledgerush.com/paginated_txt/etext05/7brwn10/7brwn10_s1_p1_pages.h tml

Project Gutenberg. An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry by Robert Browning http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=35426

Open2.net. Programmes. The Mark Steel Lectures. Byron http://www.open2.net/marksteel/byron_expert1.html

Sparknotes. Robert’s Browning Poetry http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/browning/context.html

The Norton Anthology of English Literature. http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/welcome.htm http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/review/summary.htm http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/welcome.htm http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/review/summary.htm

The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/books/alienvision/browning/3.html#com http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/abrams1.html