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.
Robert Browning was born
on 7 May 1812 in Camberwell, a middle-class suburb of London; he was the only
son of Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, and a devoutly
religious German-Scotch mother, Sarah Anna Wiedemann Browning. He had a sister,
Sarianna, who like her parents was devoted to her poet brother. While Mrs.
Browning’s piety and love of music are frequently cited as important influences
on the poet’s development, his father’s scholarly interests and unusual
educational practices may have been equally significant, particularly in regard
to Browning’s great children’s poem. The son of a wealthy banker, Robert
Browning the elder had been sent in his youth to make his fortune in the West
Indies, but he found the slave economy there so distasteful that he returned,
hoping for a career in art and scholarship. A quarrel with his father and the
financial necessity it entailed led the elder Browning to relinquish his dreams
so as to support himself and his family through his bank clerkship. Robert's father, a
literary collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them rare.
Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources. His
mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist and a talented
musician.[1] His younger
sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brother's companion in his later years, after the death of his wife in 1861. His father encouraged his
children's interest in literature and the arts.[1]
By twelve, Browning had written a book of poetry which he later
destroyed when no publisher could be found. After being at one or two private
schools, and showing an insuperable dislike of school life, he was educated at
home by a tutor via the resources of his father's extensive library.[1] By the age of
fourteen he was fluent in French, Greek, Italian and Latin.
He became a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. Following the precedent of Shelley, Browning became an atheist and vegetarian,
both of which he gave up later. At the age of sixteen, he studied Greek
at University College London but left after his first year.[1] His parents'
staunch evangelical
faith prevented
his studying at either Oxford or Cambridge University, both then open only to members of the Church of England.[1] He had inherited
substantial musical ability through his mother, and composed arrangements of
various songs. He refused a formal career and ignored his parents' remonstrations,
dedicating himself to poetry. He stayed at home until the age of 34,
financially dependent on his family until his marriage. His father sponsored
the publication of his son's poems.[1]
Although the
early part of Robert Browning’s creative life was spent in comparative
obscurity, he has come to be regarded as one of the most important poets of the
Victorian period. His dramatic
monologues and the psycho-historical epic The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), a novel in verse, have
established him as a major figure in the history of English poetry. His claim
to attention as a children’s writer is more modest, resting as it does almost
entirely on one poem, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” included almost as an
afterthought in Bells and Pomegranites. No.
III.—Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
and evidently never highly regarded by its creator. Nevertheless, “The Pied
Piper” moved quickly into the canon of children’s literature, where it has
remained ever since, receiving the dubious honor (shared by the fairy tales of
Hans Christian Andersen and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, 1911) of
appearing almost as frequently in “adapted” versions as in the author’s
original.
In March 1833, Pauline, a fragment of a confession was
published anonymously by Saunders and Otley at the expense of the author, the
costs of printing having been borne by an aunt, Mrs Silverthorne.[7] It is a long
poem composed in homage to Shelley and somewhat in his style. Originally Browning
considered Pauline as the first of a series written by
different aspects of himself, but he soon abandoned this idea. The press
noticed the publication. W.J. Fox writing in the The Monthly Repository of
April 1833 discerned merit in the work. Allan Cunningham praised it in the The Athenaeum. However, it sold no copies.[8] Some years
later, probably in 1850, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti came across it in the
Reading Room of the British Museum and wrote to
Browning, then in Florence to ask if he
was the author.[9] John Stuart Mill, however, wrote
that the author suffered from an "intense and morbid self-consciousness".[10] Later Browning was rather embarrassed by the work, and
only included it in his collected poems of 1868 after making substantial
changes and adding a preface in which he asked for indulgence for a boyish
work.[9]
In 1834 he
accompanied the Chevalier George de Benkhausen, the Russian consul-general, on
a brief visit to St Petersburg and began Paracelsus,
which was published in 1835.[11] The subject of the 16th century savant and alchemist was probably suggested to him by the Comte Amédée de
Ripart-Monclar, to whom it was dedicated. The publication had some commercial and critical success, being
noticed by Wordsworth, Dickens, Landor, J.S. Mill and others, including Tennyson (already
famous). It is a monodrama without action, dealing with the problems
confronting an intellectual trying to find his role in society. It gained him
access to the London literary world.
As a result of his
new contacts he met Macready, who invited him to write a play.[11] Strafford was
performed five times. Browning then wrote two other plays, one of which was not
performed, while the other failed, Browning having fallen out with Macready.
In 1838 he visited Italy, looking for background for Sordello, a long poem in heroic couplets,
presented as the imaginary biography of the Mantuan bard spoken of by Dante in theDivine Comedy, canto 6 of
Purgatory, set against a background of hate and conflict during the
Guelph-Ghibelline wars. This was published in 1840 and met with widespread
derision, gaining him the reputation of wanton carelessness and obscurity.
Tennyson commented that he only understood the first and last lines and Carlyle
claimed that his wife had read the poem through and could not tell whether
Sordello was a man, a city or a book.[12]
Browning's reputation began to make a partial recovery with the
publication, 1841–1846, of Bells and Pomegranates, a series of
eight pamphlets, originally intended just to include his plays. Fortunately his
publisher, Moxon, persuaded him to include some "dramatic lyrics",
some of which had already appeared in periodicals.[11]
In 1845, Browning met the poet Elizabeth Barrett, six years his elder, who lived as a semi-invalid in her
father's house in Wimpole Street, London. They began
regularly corresponding and gradually a romance developed between them, leading
to their marriage and journey to Italy (for Elizabeth's health) on 12 September
1846.[13][14] The marriage was initially secret because Elizabeth's
domineering father disapproved of marriage for any of his children. Mr. Barrett
disinherited Elizabeth, as he did for each of his children who married: “The Mrs. Browning of
popular imagination was a sweet, innocent young woman who suffered endless
cruelties at the hands of a tyrannical papa but who nonetheless had the good
fortune to fall in love with a dashing and handsome poet named Robert Browning. ”[15] At her
husband's insistence, the second edition of Elizabeth’s Poems included
her love sonnets. The book increased her popularity and high critical regard,
cementing her position as an eminent Victorian poet. Upon William Wordsworth's death in 1850, she was a serious contender to
become Poet Laureate, the position eventually going to Tennyson.
From the time of their marriage and until Elizabeth's death, the
Brownings lived in Italy, residing
first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence at Casa Guidi (now a museum to
their memory).[13] Their only
child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed
"Penini" or "Pen", was born in 1849.[13] In these years
Browning was fascinated by, and learned from, the art and atmosphere of Italy.
He would, in later life, describe Italy as his university. As Elizabeth had inherited money of her own, the couple
were reasonably comfortable in Italy, and their relationship together was
happy. However, the literary assault on Browning's work did not
let up and he was critically dismissed further, by patrician writers such
as Charles Kingsley, for the desertion of England for foreign lands.[13]
Spiritualism[edit]
Browning believed spiritualism to be the result
of fraud, and proved to be one of Daniel Dunglas Home's most adamant critics. Browning and his
wife Elizabeth attended a séance on 23, July 1855 in Ealing with the
Rymers.[16] During the
séance a spirit face materialized which Home claimed was the son of Browning
who had died in infancy. Browning seized the "materialization" and
discovered it to be the bare foot of Home. To make the deception worse,
Browning had never lost a son in infancy.[17]
After attending
the séance, Browning wrote in a letter to The Times that: 'the
whole display of hands, spirit utterances etc., was a cheat and imposture'.[18] Browning's
son Robertin a letter to the London Times, December 5, 1902
referred to the incident "Home was detected in a vulgar fraud."[19] Browning
gave his unflattering impression of Home in the poem, "Sludge the
Medium" (1864). His wife, Elizabeth was convinced that the phenomena she
witnessed were genuine and their discussions about Home were a constant source
of disagreement.[20]
Themes, Motifs and Symbols
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 Sa int 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.
Poetic style
Browning
is popularly known by his shorter poems, such as Porphyria's Lover, My Last Duchess, Rabbi Ben Ezra, How They Brought
the Good News from Ghent to Aix,
and The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
His
fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues,
in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the
speaker's character. Unlike a soliloquy, the meaning in a Browning dramatic
inadvertently "gives away" about
himself in the process of rationalising past actions, or
"special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor in the poem. .
The Ring and the Book is an epic-length poem in which he justifies the ways
of God to humanity through
twelve extended blank verse monologues spoken by the principals in a trial
about a murder. These monologues greatly influenced many later poets, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.[citation needed] The work was a best-seller in
its day, but a later critic, Anthony Burgess, commented "We all want to
like Browning, but we find it very hard."[22]
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 theIndustrial 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.
list of works
·
Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
·
Strafford (play) (1837)
·
Sordello (1840)
·
Bells and Pomegranates No. I: Pippa Passes (play) (1841)
·
Bells and Pomegranates No. II: King Victor and King Charles (play) (1842)
·
Bells and Pomegranates No. III: Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
·
"My Last Duchess"
·
"Count Gismond"
·
Bells and Pomegranates No. IV: The Return of the Druses (play) (1843)
·
Bells and Pomegranates No. V: A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (play) (1843)
·
Bells and Pomegranates No. VI: Colombe's Birthday (play) (1844)
·
Bells and Pomegranates No. VII: Dramatic Romances and
Lyrics (1845)
·
"The Laboratory"
·
"The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church"
·
"The Lost Leader"
·
"Meeting at Night"
·
Bells and Pomegranates No. VIII: Luria and A
Soul's Tragedy (plays) (1846)
·
Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day (1850)
·
Men and Women (1855)
·
"Fra Lippo Lippi"
·
"Andrea Del Sarto"
·
"A Grammarian's Funeral"
·
"An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of
Karshish, the Arab Physician"
·
Dramatis Personae (1864)
·
"Rabbi Ben Ezra"
·
The Ring and the Book (1868–69)
·
Balaustion's Adventure (1871)
·
Fifine at the Fair (1872)
·
Red Cotton Night-Cap
Country, or, Turf and Towers (1873)
·
Aristophanes' Apology (1875)
·
The Inn Album (1875)
·
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877)
·
La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878)
·
Dramatic Idylls (1879)
·
Dramatic Idylls: Second Series (1880)
·
Jocoseria (1883)
·
Ferishtah's Fancies (1884)
·
Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887)
·
Asolando (1889)
·
Prospice
·
The Year's at the Spring
Major works[edit]
In Florence, probably from early in 1853, Browning worked on the
poems that eventually comprised his two-volume Men and Women, for which he is now well known;[13] in 1855,
however, when these were published, they made relatively little impact.
Elizabeth died in 1861: Robert Browning returned to London the
following year with Pen, by then 12 years old, and made their home in 17
Warwick Crescent, Maida
Vale. It was only when he
returned to England and became part of the London literary scene—albeit while
paying frequent visits to Italy (though never again to Florence)—that his
reputation started to take off.[13]
In 1868, after five years work, he completed and published the
long blank-verse poem The Ring and the Book. Based on a convoluted murder-case from 1690s Rome, the poem is
composed of twelve books, essentially ten lengthy dramatic monologues narrated
by the various characters in the story, showing their individual perspectives
on events, bookended by an introduction and conclusion by Browning himself.
Long, even by Browning's own standards (over twenty thousand lines), The
Ring and the Book was the poet's most ambitious project and arguably
his greatest work; it has been praised as a tour de force of
dramatic poetry.[21] Published
separately in four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869, the
poem was a success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning
the renown he had sought for nearly forty years.[21] The Robert
Browning Society was formed in 1881 and his work was recognised as belonging
within the British literary canon.[21]
Last years and death[edit]
In the remaining years
of his life Browning travelled extensively. After a series of long poems
published in the early 1870s, of which Balaustion's Adventure and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country were the
best-received.[21] The volume Pacchiarotto,
and How He Worked in Distemper included an attack against
Browning's critics, especially Alfred Austin, later to
become Poet Laureate. In 1878, he revisited Italy for the first time in the
seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several further
occasions. In 1887, Browning produced the major work of his later years, Parleyings
with Certain People of Importance in Their Day. It finally presented the
poet speaking in his own voice, engaging in a series of dialogues with
long-forgotten figures of literary, artistic, and philosophic history. The
Victorian public was baffled by this, and Browning returned to the brief,
concise lyric for his last volume, Asolando (1889),
published on the day of his death.[21] Browning was awarded many
distinctions. He was made LL.D. of Edinburgh, a life Governor of London University, and
had the offer of theLord Rectorship of Glasgow. But he turned down anything that involved
public speaking.
Browning died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12
December 1889.[21] He was buried
in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies
immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.[21]
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