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Robert Browning (1812-1889) |
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English poet, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue. It took a
long time before Robert
Browning achieved success as a poet. He lived at home and was
financially dependent on his father's allowance well into adulthood.
The year 1846, when
Browning married Elizabeth Barrett and moved with her to Italy, was the
turning point in his life. Be sure I looked up her eyes Robert Browning was born in Rainbow Cottage, Camberwell, south London, the son of
Robert Browning, a bibliophile and wealthy clerk in the Bank of England, and Sarah Anna
Wiedemann, of German-Scottish origin. In his youth Robert Browning
Senior had spent some time on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, where
he became disgusted at the slaves' treatment. Back at England, he
thought of a career of an artist, but eventually accepted his job at
the bank. Sarah Anna loved music and gardening. The historian Thomas
Carlyle, a friend of Browning's father, called her "the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman". (Life and Letters of Robert Browning by Alexandra Orr, 2019, p. 14) Carlyle said that both parents worshopped their talented son. Browning received scant formal education, but he had access to his father's large (6,000 vols)
library; books filled the
family's house in Hanover Cottage, where they had moved when he was 12. In his teens, Browning discovered Shelley. His first poems Browning wrote under his spell. Shelley also inspired him to adopt atheist principles for
a time. At the age of 16, Browning began to study at newly established London University. Disillusioned with the curriculum and his fellow-students, Browning dropped out after a brief period. His parents did not object his decision, but supported him morally and financially. In 1833 Browning published anonymously Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession.
It has been said that it was inspired by Eliza Flower, a performer and
composer of religious music. At first the publication did not attract much attention. Eventually Pauline was noted by J.S. Mills and then it sold fairly
well. Between 1834 and 1836 The Monthly Repository published
several shorter poems by Browning. In the winter of 1833-1834 he
travelled to Russia and made in 1838 his first trip to Italy. Letters
he wrote to his sister from St. Petersburg have not survived – Browning
destroyed them, like his other early letters to his family, toward the
end of his life. But it is known that was impressed by the snow-covered
pine-forests, witnessed the break-up of the ice on the River Neva, and
saw the Czar of Russia, Nicholas I, drinking the first glass of water
from it in the annual ceremony. (Life and Letters of Robert Browning by Mrs Sutherland Orr, 1891, pp. 64-65) (Nicholas I died in 1855.) Paracelsus (1835), Browning's first important poem, dealt with the life of the famous Swiss alchemist,
from the beginning of his career to its sad end in Salzburg. Although
it was written in the form of dialogue, it was not intended for a
drama. The poem found its way to the hands of Thomas Carlyle and William
Wordsworth, who at a party said, "I am proud to drink your health, Mr
Browning." (Browning and Wordsworth by John Haydn Baker, 2004, p. 25)
From
1837 to 1846 Browning attempted to write verse drama for the stage.
"His stage plays . . . are unrescuably bad, deserved to fail, and by
failing did him the best turn they could." ('Introduction' by Daniel Karlin, in The Major Works, edited with notes by Adam Roberts, 2005. p. xiii)
During these years Browning met Dickens and Tennyson, and formed
several important friendships. However, he didn't attempt to try his luck as a novelist like Dickens. Between 1841 and 1846 Browning works appeared under the title Bells and Pomegranates. It contained several of his best-known lyrics, such as How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, and Pippa Passes (1841), a dramatic poem depicting a silk winder and his wandering in Italy. Among his earlier works was Sordello (1840), set against the background of restless southern Europe of the 13th century. It influenced Ezra Pound in his conception of the Cantos. However, Sordello's hostile reception shadowed Browning's reputation for over twenty years. In 1846 Browning married the poet Elizabeth Barrett
(1806-1861), and settled with her in Florence. He produced
comparatively little poetry during the next 15 years. John Ruskin
admired her poetry; the correspondence between Ruskin and Mrs. Browning
was warm and open. In October 1857 he wrote to her: "I write in queer
desperation, having been all the summer wondering when I should be in
such a good and happy state of mind as to be worthy to write to you or
to Robert. I have been very bad and sulky all the summer and have never
written, and I regret it the more because I fear you may have never got
a letter of mine". ('Ruskin and the Brownings: Twenty-five Unpublished Letters,' edited by D. J. DeLaura, in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Volume 54, Issue 2, March 1972, p. 337) When Elizabeth died in 1861, Browning said: "I shall live out the remainder in her
direct influence, endeavoring to complete mine, miserably imperfect
now, but so as to take the good she was meant to me." (The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life by Richard S. Kennedy and Donald S. Hair, 2007, p. 293) Her death was signalized by the appearance of a comet. Shattered by the loss, Browning left
their house, Casa Guidi, where he had enjoyed a happy married life, and
moved to London with his son Robert Barrett Browning (1849-1912). There he wrote his greatest poem, The Ring and the Book (1869), a 21,000 lines long hymn to Elizabeth. It based on the proceedings in a murder trial in Rome in 1698; Browning had bought the documents from a flea market in Florence. Count Guido Francesshini, a fifty-year-old nobleman had married a thirteen-year-old girl, Pompilia Comparini, who ran back to her parents to Rome after four years of misery. Guido followed Pompilia to Rome, and murdered the Comparinis with his accomplices. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. The Ring and the Bookconsisted of 10 verse narratives, all dealing with the same crime, each from a distinct viewpoint. The ring in the title referred to a gold circlet, that had belonged to Elizabeth and which he kept on his watch chain: "Do you see this ring? / 'This Rome-work, made to match / (By Castellani's imitative craft) / Etruscian circlets found, some happy morn, / After a dropping April; found alive / Spark-like 'mid underneath slope-side fig-tree roots / That roof old tombs at Chiusi..." Browning made poetry compete with prose, and used idioms of ordinary speech in his text. Many poems take the form of the dramatic monologue, in which the speaker, who is the voice of the poet speaking through a mask, addresses a listener: "I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! / You need not clap your torches to my face. / Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!" These lines are from 'Fra Lippo Lippi' (1855), which Browning wrote after reading Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. A typical Browning poem tells of a key moment in the life of the speaker. Browning often crammed his meaning into so few words that many readers found it difficult to grasp what the poem was about. In the 1850s and 1860s Browning's reputation began to revive. In 1855 appeared the masterpiece of his middle period, Men and Women, a critical and commercial failure. With Dramatis Personae (1864) and The Ring and the Book he was back in the literary scene. In 1866, after his father died, Browning lived with his sister, generally spending the season in London, and the rest of the year in the country or abroad. The history and climate of Italy suited him well, but he also developed a tendency toward nostalgia of England: "Oh, to be in England / Now that April's there," he wrote in 'Home Thoughts, from Abroad'. In the 1870s Browning published several works, including The Inn Album (1875), a dramatic poems, where two couples use the visitors' book to convey messages, and a translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), about religious faith, illicit love, and mental illness, was praised in the Examiner, but the reviewer in the Illustrated London warned, that the poem "will be found a hard nut to crack." Some American reviewers were not pleased with the poem's subject, taken directly from life. Browning had heard in 1870 from his friend the story of the suicide of a wealthy Paris jeweler, Antoine Mellerio, and then investigated the case further, visiting Mellerio's chateau and collecting material relating to the events. The title of the poems refers to the bonnet rouge of the French Revolution, and the traditional head-gear worn by Normandian women. Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889, in his son's house in Venice. Various difficulties made the poet's requested burial in Florence impossible, and his body was returned to England to be interred in Westminster Abbey. The Browning Society was founded in 1881. A prolific poet, Browning also was an avid letter writer. An edition of his correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett Browning was published in 1926. The Brownings' correspondence is projected to contain 40 volumes. Browning's narrative poem, 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,' inspired Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which began in 1982 with The Gunslinger.
Selected works:
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