Chapter I

The Life of Robert Browning: an Introduction

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812 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. His father was a well-paid clerk

for the Bank of England, earning about £150 per year. 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. There

is little evidence to support this rumour, and it seems to be merely an anecdotal family

story 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 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.

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

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showing an insuperable dislike to school life, he was educated at home by a tutor via

the resources of his father's extensive library. 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. His parents' staunch

evangelical faith prevented his studying at either Oxford University or Cambridge

University, both then open only to members of the Church of England. 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.

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. 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. Some years later, probably in 1850, Rosetti 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. John Stuart Mill, however, wrote that the author

suffered from an "intense and morbid self-consciousness". Later, Browning was rather

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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.

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. 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. 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

blank verse,presented as the imaginary biography of the Mantuan bard spoken of by

Dante in the Divine Comedy, canto 6 of Purgattory, 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.

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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.

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. 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.” 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.

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Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed "Penini"

or "Pen", was born in 1849. 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.

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; 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.

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

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work; it has been praised as a tour de force of dramatic poetry. 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. The Robert Browning Society was formed in 1881

and his work was recognised as belonging within the British literary canon.

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. The volume Pacchiarotto,

and How He Worked in Distemper included an attack against Browning's critics,

especially Alfred Austin, later to become Poet Laureate. According to some reports

Browning became romantically involved with Louisa, Lady Ashburton, but he refused

her proposal of marriage, and did not re-marry. 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.

Browning died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December

1889. He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies

immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.

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Browning was awarded many distinctions. He was made LL.D. of Edinburgh, a life

Governor of London University, and had the offer of the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow.

But he turned down anything that involved public speaking.

Browning is often known by some of his short poems, such as Porphyria's

Lover, My Last Duchess,Rabbi Ben Ezra, How they brought the good News to Aix,

Evelyn Hope, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, A Grammarian's Funeral, A Death in the

Desert. Initially, Browning was not regarded as a great poet, since his subjects were

often recondite and lay beyond the ken and sympathy of the great bulk of readers; and

owing, partly to the subtle links connecting the ideas and partly to his often extremely

condensed and rugged expression, the treatment of theme was often difficult and

obscure.

Browning’s 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 monologue is not what the

speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently "gives away" about himself in the

process of rationalizing past actions, or "special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor

in the poem. Rather than thinking out loud, the character composes a self-defence

which the reader, as "juror," is challenged to see through. Browning chooses some of

the most debased, extreme and even criminally psychotic characters, no doubt for the

challenge of building a sympathetic case for a character who does not deserve one and

to cause the reader to squirm at the temptation to acquit a character who may be a

homicidal psychopath. One of his more sensational dramatic monologues is

Porphyria's Lover.

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Yet it is by carefully reading the far more sophisticated and cultivated rhetoric

of the aristocratic and civilized Duke of My Last Duchess, perhaps the most

frequently cited example of the poet's dramatic monologue form, that the attentive

reader discovers the most horrific example of a mind totally mad despite its eloquence

in expressing itself. The duchess, we learn, was murdered not because of infidelity,

not because of a lack of gratitude for her position, and not, finally, because of the

simple pleasures she took in common everyday occurrences. She is reduced to an

objet d'art in the Duke's collection of paintings and statues because the Duke equates

his instructing her to behave like a duchess with "stooping," an action of which his

megalomaniac pride is incapable. In other monologues, such as Fra Lippo Lippi,

Browning takes an ostensibly unsavory or immoral character and challenges us to

discover the goodness, or life-affirming qualities, that often put the speaker's

contemporaneous judges to shame. In The Ring and the Book Browning writes 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, high modernists, the latter singling out in his Cantos Browning's convoluted

psychological poem Sordello about a frustrated 13-century troubadour, as the poem he

must work to distance himself from. These concerns reflected Victorian society in the

late 19th century.

But he remains too much the prophet-poet for the conceits, puns, and verbal

play of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His is a modern sensibility,

all too aware of the arguments against the vulnerable position of one of his simple

characters, who recites: "God's in His Heaven; All's right with the world." Browning

endorses such a position because he sees an immanent deity that, far from remaining

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in a transcendent heaven, is indivisible from temporal process, assuring that in the

fullness of theological time there is ample cause for celebrating life.

At a dinner party on 7 April 1889, at the home of Browning's friend the artist

Rudolf Lehmann, an Edison cylinder phonograph recording was made on a white wax

cylinder by Edison's British representative, George Gouraud. In the recording, which

still exists, Browning recites part of "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent

to Aix" (and can be heard apologizing when he forgets the words). When the

recording was played in 1890 on the anniversary of his death, at a gathering of his

admirers, it was said to be the first time anyone's voice "had been heard from beyond

the grave.

In his introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of Browning's

poems 1833-1864 Ian Jack comments that Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra

Pound and T. S. Eliot "all learned from Browning's exploration of the exploration of

the possibilities of dramatic poetry and of colloquial idiom".

In 1930 the story of Browning and his wife Elizabeth was made into a play

The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolph Besier. The play was a success and

brought popular fame to the couple in the United States. The role of Elizabeth became

a signature role for the actress Katharine Cornell. It was twice adapted into film. It

was also the basis of the stage musical Robert and Elizabeth, with music by Ron

Grainer and book and lyrics by Ronald Millar.

The basis of Terence Rattigan's 1948 play is a pupil making a parting present

to his teacher of an inscribed copy of what is referred to as The Browning Version

(Robert Browning's translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus).

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Stephen King's The Dark Tower was chiefly inspired by the poem "Childe

Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning, whose full text was included

in the final volume's appendix.

A memorial plaque on the site of his London home, Warwick Crescent, was

unveiled on 11 December 1993. Browning Close in Royston, Hertfordshire, is named

after Robert Browning.

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Chapter II

The Poems of Robert Browning

Browing has always been noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue.

Robert Browning was long unsuccesful as a poet and financially dependent upon his

family until he was well into adulthood. In his best works people from the past reveal

their thoughts and lives as if speaking or thinking aloud.

"Be sure I looked up her eyes

--Happy and proud; at last I knew

Porphyria worshipped me; surprise

--Made my heart swell, and still it grew

--While I debated what to do.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

--Perfectly pure and good; I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

--In one long yellow string I wound

--Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her. No pain felt she;

--I am quite sure she felt no pain."

(Porphyria's Lover of the line 31 to 14)

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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

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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.

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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.

Since 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.

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Chapter III

A Short Summary of the Poems of Robert Browning

"My Last Duchess" is narrated by the duke of Ferrara to the envoy of his new

intended bride. The duke shows the envoy a painting of his former wife, whom he had

killed for having been so flirtatious."Porphyria's Lover" is narrated by a man who has

murdered his lover Porphyria in order to capture a moment in which they were both

happy in love.

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is a resentful narration by a monk who

watches his professed enemy Brother Lawrence as the latter plants flowers. "Home-

Thoughts, From Abroad" is a British expatriate's nostalgic thoughts of England, and

how it must be beautiful in the newly-arrived spring. "Love Among the Ruins" is a

contemplation of how a pastoral landscape, where the narrator's beloved is currently

waiting for him, was once the setting of a great empire that has since fallen.

"Meeting at Night" is an intense description of a man's intense travel over land

and sea to rendezvous with his beloved. "My Star" is a lover's contemplation of how

he loves a particular star even though others do not see in it the beauty he does.

"The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church" is a rambling dramatic

monologue in which a dying bishop speaks to young men he calls his "sons," asking

them to build him a great tomb so that he can shame his rival who is buried nearby.

"Prospice" is a contemplation of impending death, in which the narrator

bravely anticipates the journey to and through death so that he can be reunited with

his beloved. "Fra Lippo Lippi" is the narration of a Renaissance painter and monk

whose talent is admired by the Church, but whose interest in naturalism – in painting

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the world as it really looks – is repudiated by the Church in favor of more moral,

religious subjects. Lippo has been apprehended by some authority figures while

prowling the red light district of Vienna, and defends both his behavior and his artistic

aesthetic in the monologue.

"Two in the Campagna" is a contemplation of how a man cannot fully unite

with his beloved because time constantly changes his feelings. As he contemplates the

fall of Rome and how their bodies keep their souls from joining together, he finds the

strength to persevere.

"A Toccata of Galuppi's" is spoken to Renaissance composer Galuppi, and the

narrator considers how Galuppi's music once brought pleasure to Venetians who later

died as everyone does. Considering the disconnect between pleasant art and

impending death brings melancholy to the speaker.

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is a deeply symbolist poem that

follows a traveling knight in search of a Dark Tower that he knows will bring

disappointment and probably death, but who persists nevertheless. In his search for

the Dark Tower, Roland travels through a deserted landscape, a terrible setting almost

as bad as Roland's own memories.

"Memorabilia" recounts a meeting between the narrator and another man who

had once met the Romantic poet Shelley. The narrator is much excited about hearing

the story, and reflects on how small moments can stay with us forever.

"Andrea del Sarto" is narrated by a Renaissance painter renowned for creating

"faultless" paintings, but who laments the lack of "soul" in his work. He blames his

wife Lucrezia for not inspiring him to the soulful works of the other Renaissance

greats, but ultimately changes his tone to accept his faults as his own doing.

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"Caliban Upon Setebos" is a monologue spoken by Caliban, the humanoid

creature from Shakespeare's The Tempest, about Setebos, whom he believes is his

creator. He considers the apathy and resentment of God, and wonders how he can

make the most of life without bringing Setebos's wrath down upon him.

"Rabbi Ben Ezra" is a theological monologue spoken by a historical

theologian, about how one ought exercise patience in life in preparation for greater

quests to come. He praises old age as having the understanding that escapes youth,

which attempts to constantly seize the day. "Life in a Love" is a contemplation of love

as fate, which the speaker must accept. No matter what happens, he knows he cannot

help but continue to pursue his beloved.

"The Pied Piper of Hamelin" is a delightful adaptation of the classic folk tale,

in which a flutist with the power to attract anyone to his music is hired to help a town

overrun with rats get rid of its rodents. When the Mayor and Corporation of the town

refuse him his promised fee, he uses his music to rob the town of its children."The

Laboratory" is narrated by a young lady-in-waiting to an old apothecary who is

preparing for her a poison she wishes to use on her rivals for a man at court.

"How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" follows several

horsemen as they rush from the titular towns to bring important news. Only the

narrator survives, and celebrates his horse for surviving the intense journey. "Evelyn

Hope" is narrated by a middle-aged man to the corpse of a young girl he had patiently

loved from afar. He anticipates rejoining her in the afterlife.

"A Grammarian's Funeral" is narrated by a disciple of a grammarian who had

renounced normal life in favor of a life fully devoted to lonely scholarship. The

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grammarian has died, and his body is being carried to a worthy resting place as his

memory is celebrated by the speaker.

"Death in the Desert" is a recounting of the last days of St. John, who wrote

the Fourth Gospel, and who has been accused of inventing details about Christ's life.

John admits to having lied in order to relate the more important truth: people should

accept faith based on the wonders of life rather than on rational observation.

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Conclusion

Though one of several Victorian poets whose legacy has endured long past his

age, Robert Browning is arguably the hardest of his contemporaries to classify. His

work equally reflects his remarkable intellectualism, his interest in grotesqueness and

his refusal to espouse any consistent worldview. These disparate elements make it

difficult to categorize his oeuvre under any simple classification.

Browning did not find much popular success until later in his life, largely

because the public either found his work obscure and difficult, or because they

considered imperfect some of the very qualities that are now lauded. Examples of

these elements were irregular rhyme schemes, contradictory characters, or

imprecision about character motives. Perhaps this lack of success has proven a boon

to Browning's legacy, however, since it allowed him to continue to follow his own

eccentricities without the pressure of having to subscribe to popular taste, thereby

creating work now appreciated for its uniqueness.

Browning is perhaps most famous for his use of the dramatic monologue, a

poem written from the point of view of someone who has dramatic imperative to

argue for him or herself. This form fits Browning's interests perfectly, since it allows

him to empathize with perspectives he likely did not hold himself, thereby

considering myriad human perspectives and to investigate the remarkable human

facility for rationalizing our behavior and beliefs.

Much of his poetry, however, has a deliberately philosophical edge. Again,

Browning believed that humans are constantly changing, their attitudes subject to

shifts day-by-day or hour-by-hour. However, by using the dramatic monologue, he

was able to explore a philosophy in the moment, and some of his work, like "Death in

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the Desert" or "Rabbi Ben Ezra," is as much defined by their statement of belief as by

any dramatic situation. Even some of the more dramatic poems are difficult to engage

if the reader is not ready to engage in questions of existence, time, memory, or love.

Despite his pronounced interest in psychology, Browning's early influence

came from the Romantic poets, particularly Shelley. Reflecting this interest in human

emotions as the path to transcendence, Browning's collections continued to feature

shorter meditations on love and individuality. While these poems tend to be easier to

categorize than the more sophisticated monologues and philosophical poems, they too

reflect his belief that a human is always "becoming," always changing.

Overall, what one can take from Browning's work is that the poet himself

lived according to one of his more prevalent themes: the quest. A mercurial and

intellectually adventurous man who sought to document his ever-changing attitudes

and beliefs into art, Robert Browning saw the human struggle as a noble quest

towards an impossible goal of perfection, and luckily thought to immortalize that

struggle as best he could.

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References

Browning, Robert. Selected Poems. Ed. Daniel Karlin. London: Penguin, 2004.

Kreilkamp, Ivan. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005.

Ian Jack, ed. (1970). "Introduction and Chronology". Browning Poetical Works

1833-1864. Oxford University Press.

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/browning/analysis.html

http://www.gradesaver.com/robert-browning-poems/study-guide/short-summary/

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/hcorson/bl-hcorson-intro-poems.htm

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