Selected Poems

by Robert Browning, Daniel Karlin (Editor)

Robert Browning was one of the greatest of English poets, whose intense and original imagination enabled him to transform any subject he chose - whether everyday or sublime - into startling memorable verse. In his work he brought to life the personalities of a diverse range of characters, and introduced a new immediacy, colloquial energy and psychological complexity to the poetry of his day. This selection brings together verse ranging from early dramatic monologues such as the chilling 'My Last Duchess' and the ribald 'Fra Lippo Lippi', which show his gift for inhabiting the mind of another, to the popular children's poem 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' and many lesser known works. All display his innovative techniques of diction, rhythm and symbol, which transformed Victorian poetry and influenced major poets of the twentieth century such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, 19th Century, Victorian, Fiction, Literature, British Literature

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Robert Browning (1812-1889) was a British poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.

Browning began writing poetry at age 13. These poems were eventually collected, but were later destroyed by Browning himself. In 1833, Browning's "Pauline" was published and received a cool reception. Harold Bloom believes that John Stuart Mill's review of the poem pointed Browning in the direction of the dramatic monologue.

In 1845, Browning wrote a letter to the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, professing that he loved her poetry and her. In 1846, the couple eloped to Europe, eventually settling in Florence in 1847. They had a son Pen.

Upon Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death in 1861, Browning returned to London with his son. While in London, he published Dramatis Personae (1864) and The Ring and the Book (1869), both of which gained him critical priase and respect. His last book Asolando was published in 1889 when the poet was 77.

In 1889, Browning traveled to Italy to visit friends. He died in Venice on December 12 while visiting his sister.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very impressed by Browning's dramatic monologs, "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea Del Sarto," "My Last Duchess,""Soliloquy in the Spanish Cloister," and "Caliban" reacting to Darwin. In "My Last Duchess," the Duke had his Duchess, who rode a white mule, killed because she was friendly to all,
"She thanked men,-- good! but thanked
Somehow-- I know not how-- as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years old name
With anybody's gift."
He puts up a statue to her, "There she stands/As if alive." (Riverside 1896, p.252).
Browning writes with prose sense, but rhymed--here pentameters, but a couple poems later, verses written in his 1844 visit to Italy, "The Italian in England." This Italian is wanted by Austria, so hiding.
"An hour and she returned alone
Exactly where my glove was thrown.
Meanwhile came many thoughts; on me
Rested the hopes of Italy." (259)
This, rhymed tetrameters. Browning wrote a huge amount, my Cambridge edition a thousand pages, double columned, small font (6 point?).

But I also read his formidable long poem, the "Ring and the Book," a mystery as I recall--from reading it a half-century ago in a grad school survey of Victorian Lit with G Robert Stange, who left our U Minnesota to chair at Tufts.
The monologs I taught yearly in English Lit sophomore surveys, my most advanced course at community colleges until I began teaching Shakespeare. I told my classes Browning's monologs foreshadowed Faulkner's perspectivism, say in As I Lay Dying, where different chapters are told from different perspectives, though Addie Bundren's emerge more ironic.

[Zoeb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody else than Graham Greene could have summed it up more perfectly when he wrote in his memoir: "In Browning, there was the sense of danger, adventure, change." It seems hardly surprising, this succinct summary, since Greene's own work as a storyteller was marked by these very elements and featured many a honest thief and a tender murderer too. Like him, Browning's interest, true to his protagonist Bishop Blougram, was indeed on the "dangerous edge of things". The most recognizable quality of his poetry is its unpredictability, especially of a moral or religious aspect. Just as Wordsworth expressed the romanticism of nature and Tennyson chronicled the brooding intensity of Gothic drama, Browning always sought to explore the ambiguous and, often dark, intricacy of human behaviour and its incongruities.

This inference should place his work in its proper perspective - neatly divided as it is between his most well-known dramatic monologues and his shorter, tighter, poems, equally noteworthy for his skill at characterization and complexity. To his critics, Browning was either too ahead of his times with his radical experiments with rhyme scheme, language and even imagery and point of view, or too much of a traditionalist, in the philosophic quality of his epic works. The much-touted difficulty in reading and understanding his works is highly exaggerated. Even his longer works like "Bishop Blougram's Apology" or "Fra Lippo Lippi" are incredible in their lucidity and eloquent discourse on the complex themes charted in their duration. And his smaller poems, more conventionally rhymed, too boast of the same bejewelled moral intricacy - the dark, almost morbid passion of "Porphyria's Lover", the seething sexual jealousy of "The Laboratory" and "My Last Duchess", the ideological disillusionment of "The Lost Leader" and "The Patriot" as well as the doomed love of "The Statue And The Bust" and "The Last Ride Together" - both rich with dazzling imagery.

Greene also wrote about that "sudden exact detail that could stir a boy physically." Reading Browning's poetry makes even a mature person aware of this astute revelation. While he was not into rendering sweeping landscapes as in the works of the afore-mentioned poets, Browning was nevertheless skilled in weaving nuance and precise detail into his poems. There is an intimacy, thus, to the characters whose flaws and failings are chronicled in these verses and we can instantly feel and resonate with their inner demons and despair; we feel repulsed at their sins and vices and yet we are drawn to them by a perverse sense of empathy. And true to what the author said, there is also a strong streak of eroticism running through these verses, which along with the intrigue and moral duplicity, lends a heady atmosphere to the eloquence of his words.

The crowning piece of the collection, well-picked and complimented by Iain Macnab's textured wood-engravings, has to be "Pippa Passes" - Browning's most famous verse drama that justifies its reputation with its ingenious and skillful blend of genres and styles. Running for a full fifty pages and yet utterly compelling from beginning to end, it follows the titular character - an innocent, idealistic young girl full of hope and happiness over the dawn of a new day and as she trespasses through a whole cast of characters in the span of the day, we are also tugged into the tangle of their sins and secrets - adultery and murder, a passionate plot of regicide, a practical joke with serious consequences and even a murderous scandal in the Church. Pippa's innocent and poetic musings on the world around her serve as the perfect foil to the darkness of these people and their thoughts and deeds, thus demonstrating Browning's grasp of human nature as well as his skill at experimentation and eloquence.

"Who will read Browning?" mused Sir Walter Besant in some bewilderment and yet, the passage of years has proved that he is still very much a popular and relevant poet even today. He has been admired by great authors such as Greene, Evelyn Waugh, G.K Chesterton and Henry James and he even enjoyed a reputation with popular figures such as John Lennon & Yoko Ono and Stephen King. All this as well as the uniformly startling, original and daringly provocative quality of his work has proved that Browning will indeed be read and revered forever.

[J. Alfred · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know that obnoxious comedian/impressionist who somehow landed a gig on football related television, Frank Calliendo? Well, reading Browning is like watching an infinitely more talented version of that guy.
He pretty much takes on new personas as he writes; it is astonishing. You can tell why Pound and Eliot loved the guy.
Anyway, he is also great at sort of redelivering the gospel message, so you can see again how intensely surprising it is: the best poems in the collection (and this never happens) are ones that I'd never come across before, probably because they are both very long and polemically Christian. The 'Epistle of Karshish' one, "Cleon", "Ned Bratts", and the stupendous "Death in the Desert" are the ones I mean specifically, but most were pretty great. Browning is generally fantastic if one has the patience for him. Sometimes, though, he can be a little, uh, wordy. For instance, "Mr Sludge, the 'Medium'" is something like 1400 lines long, that is, longer than book two of Paradise Lost. So, yeah. Bring your lunch.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2.5

This year (2023) I set out to start a new thing. I’ve decided that each year, I will read a Poet throughout the year, constantly revisiting them again and again as I go through their completed or sometimes selected work.

I chose Robert Browning after hearing his poem, “Meeting at Night”. The words to that poem transfixed me as if I myself were having a strange mysterious meeting at night in the wane of the dim-lighted moon.

I
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

II
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

I did not however wholly like Browning’s work. It seemed to be hit and miss with him. Some poems, I took to the rhyme scheme, analyzed carefully, and found to be enthralled with, especially his dramatic work. Poems such as “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”, “The Confessional”, even “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” reminded me of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”. Browning also had several poems about the Romantics that were also exceptional. Shelley makes his appearance in “Memorabilia”, and a felt betrayal by Wordsworth in “The Lost Leader”.

Most of the time, however, I was disappointed. It seemed more often than not, Browning’s verse was a little too choppy for my taste. Along with the chopped up rhyme schemes, most of Browning’s poems seemed to run together.

Others were a bit creepy. ”Porphyria’s Lover” is about choking your lover to death with her own hair. ”The Pied Piper of Hamelin” about a musical magician who whisks a town’s children away never to be seen of again. And ”Evelyn Hope” about an old man who stalks a young girl who doesn’t know him and then sings over her corpse.

Though I intend to read a poet every year, I think it will be a long time before I revisit Browning.

[Brok3n · Rating 4 out of 5]

Repays effort

There are treasures to be found in Robert Browning's poetry but don't expect them to be laid out for you like the candies at the grocery store cash register. Browning is famously obscure. In his introduction to Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) by Browning Robert Daniel Karlin tells this story

Tennyson said that there were only two lines in [Browning's Sordello] that he understood, the first – ‘Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told’ – and the last – ‘Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told’ – and that both were lies,

which is unkind, but still pretty funny.

This Penguin Classics edition is a well-put-together book, as Penguin Classics always are in my experience. After a brief (3 pages) introduction, we dive right into the poems, in publication order, with the exception of the final poem, which serves as a kind of epitaph. There are notes after the poems themselves, which are a big help in understanding Browning's obscurities, if you read them. I add the caveat because they are not footnoted or linked to the poems in any way. In the kindle edition you can easily miss that every poem is annotated, sometimes extensively. I would advise readers to read the notes for each poem immediately before or after the poem itself, although you will have to manually flip back there to find them.

Some of the poems are brief, but the ones I liked most were the long story-telling monologs put in the mouths of fictional characters. The longest of these are novellas in verse. My favorites among these were probably "Clive", simply because it's a good story, and "Mr Sludge, 'The Medium'", which is an extraordinarily penetrating portrait of a scoundrel -- a charlatan who pretends to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Karlin's notes tell us that this monolog is based on a real person. Browning was nobody's fool. At 1525 lines "Mr Sludge" is, I believe, the longest poem in this collection.

Despite all Karlin's help, Browning is not easy to read. In my review of another difficult book, Cat Valente's In the Night Garden, I wrote these words

I have mixed feelings about this. It is not just that she offers rewards proportionate to the work she demands. More than that, the demand itself makes the reward greater. Having worked for something makes the thing more precious than something given for nothing.

They will do as well for Browning.

Blog review.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ah, Mr. Robert Browning, we meet again.

I can't say it was a happy reunion. I didn't care for him the last time I had to read a few of his works, and I still didn't care for him now; however, compared to his wife's writing, I think I've come to appreciate him a tiny bit more.

[Rosalind · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, Browning is just the best. He can be as light as a souffle (but with a sharp kick), and achingly profound. He can build characters and he can be terrifying - not many psychological thrillers can be so chilling so succinctly as Porphyria's Lover, and he can capture the sweetness of first love. He's also shamefully neglected.

[Linden · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was an introduction to Robert Browning through Stopford A. Brooke's book ‘The Poetry of Robert Browning’, written in 1903 (available as a free kindle!) that inspired me to read and enjoy very much this Penguin Collection. Here is how Stopford describes what makes Browning a great poet:

“Browning’s noblest legacy to that wavering, faithless, pessimistic, analysis tortured world through which we have fought our way, and out of which we are emerging, is the sense of things which cannot be shaken, of faith in God, wholly independent, in its depths, of storms on the surface of mortal life. He refused to make his poetry the servant to the transient, of the changing elements in the world.”

The poems are easier to read and understand as one becomes more familiar with his writing. They are quite astonishing in their variety and depth of seeing. He was not as Stopford describes, "a man sympathising from without with Nature. He is part of Nature herself; a living piece of the great organism, having his own rejoicing life in the mightier life which includes him... To him the world was one joyous mind."

Glad to have discovered Browning and commune with a great Poet!

[David Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't evenly enamored of some of the poems in the first half of the book, though I have always been intrigued by what I knew of Browning's famed dramatic monologues. The editor's determination to feature mainly the longer poems of Browning had me the littlest bit wary. However, it was the three longest poems - the selections from The Ring and the Book - that had me most captivated. I was fascinated by the story they told, and equally fascinated by Browning's skill in imbueing the speakers of those poems with distinct character. Afterwards, I looked on the earlier works that I was unsure of in a more favorable light.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The mid-nineteenth-century ordinarily is not my favourite period of English verse, but Browning is an exception, probably in part and at first because he was an interest of Pound. This is a marvelous collection introduced, edited, and with notes by the best Browning scholar alive (to the best of my understanding).

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Browning, why are you such a genius? "Andrea del Sarto", "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", and "Meeting at Night" are among my favorites in the anthology.

[Vicky Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy the fluid movement of Browning's lines. I've reread them many times.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a love-hate relationship with poetry. The poetry that I love is that which sings to me. It does not have to have rhyme or rigid metre, but it should have cadences. Just as a song can express musically a sentiment that is plain in itself but striking when sang, so a poem can express a simple meaning but achieve beauty if the words flow sweetly.

The poetry that I hate is that which sounds like syntactically mangled prose. The poet is expressing in an elliptical and abstract way a sentiment that would sound better if it was written in plain English.

It is Robert Browning’s misfortune to be both those poets. Some of his poems are memorable and enjoyable, but there are other poems in this selection that felt like an endurance test to read through.

I suppose I should deal with those first. The worst offenders are often the longer poems, where Browning expresses himself in an expansive and vague manner that makes them hard to read. He often chooses obscure themes, explained at the back of the book, but does not explain clearly what the poem is about. I don’t mind researching the background of poems a little, but I do not want to have to read up on every other poem.

Another aspect that makes the poems difficult is that they are often monologues written by the characters. Browning is adept at suiting his style to the speech patterns of his characters, but unfortunately many of the poems seem to ramble on for ages.

No actual human being speaks in a manner even close to this. I do not expect realism in the speech of Browning’s characters. Shakespeare’s characters talk in an elevated manner too. However the dialogue should feel convincing enough to allow me to imagine I am listening to an actual conversation.

Think of “Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium’”. Here is a fascinating subject. Browning did not share his wife’s credulity towards spiritualism. After catching a medium in the act of deceit, he wrote this poem. Mr Sludge offers his mendacious excuses to justify his lies. So far, so good. However, the poem runs for nearly fifty pages, all of it a monologue by Sludge. Could Browning not have found a way to condense this into a few pages?

This is a rare personal poem in the collection. Browning eschews writing about himself. In ‘House’, he rejects the sonnet style, because he does not want people to have a glimpse of his private life, which he likens to a house that lost its frontage during an earthquake, allowing locals to see inside the owner’s home, and speculate about his private life.

Browning’s hero is Shakespeare, another writer who did not appear to allow his own private life to intrude much on his works, as far as we can tell. For different reasons, Browning does not like Wordsworth. In ‘The Lost Leader’, he deplores Wordsworth’s loss of his earlier radical ideals, although the poem is kept general enough to have universal application.

Browning was a political and religious non-conformist. This may explain that sly, often cruel sense of humour found in his most famous works. The ‘nobility’ do not come out too well in ‘My Last Duchess’, a poem about aristocratic jealousy and (probably) murder.

In his much-loved children’s poem ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, Browning portrays corrupt and incompetent government officials. The reader might spare a thought for the poor townsfolk who lose their children, even though they have not done anything wrong.

In ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, Browning seems more sympathetic to a rascally painter who wants to paint naturally, but cannot do so because he is a priest, and the church instructs him to paint the soul, and not the flesh.

Then there is the famous last line of ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. After enthusiastically greeting the woman he loves, the narrator strangles her with her hair, and ends the poem with the words, “And yet God has not said a word”.

Is Browning expressing some doubt about his god? He was not an atheist, and not even especially radical. His views about his wife’s poetry were somewhat sexist, for example. Nonetheless like any imaginative writer, he can encompass doubts, even about that in which he believes devoutly. Notably his notoriously Pollyanna poem that ends ‘God’s in his heaven – All’s right with the world’ is set in a context of murder when read fully.

I feel a little sense of disappointment in myself that I like best the poetry that is felt to be Browning’s most popular but not his best. Perhaps one day I will return to the other poems and see if a closer reading of them yields some gold that I am not seeing. As it is, I see some good poetry here, and a number of verses that left me cold.

I do admire the range of Browning's subject matter, his fluidity of style, and his willingness to take risks in his writing.

[Aurélien Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, that's that. My knowledge of Victorian poetry being poor as it is, I decided to give it a go recently. I had already found Alfred Lord Tennyson to be dragging and stuffy (although his work had its sparks) so I had braced myself for Robert Browning, despite his reputation for being otherwise challenging and no less dragging. What of it?

Poetry is subjective and so a matter of very personal taste. I like mine short and to the point; insightful; and with verses so striking in arresting ideas (e.g. I'm a great fan of personifications and metaphors) that they ought to be read again and again, even, learnt by heart. There's none of that here.

Now, I get that to admirers his monologues are masterpieces of a genre. To me, through, they're nothing but lines pilling up after lines and after lines and after lines; wearing on so tediously that -more than once!- I couldn't even understand what I was reading. About that, it's quite known that one of his poems, 'Sordello', was so long and confusing that Tennyson himself had quipped that he only understood the first and the last lines, with Jane Welsh Carlyle adding to the derision by claiming that, upon finishing reading it, she 'could not tell whether Sordello was a book, a city or a man'. Well, I felt that way exactly for nearly all of his poetry selected here!

To each their own. As far as I'm personally concerned, Browning's poetry is nothing but dull meandering and rambling, as muddled as it is devoid of feelings. It left me cold.

[Callie · Rating 3 out of 5]

These selected poems by Robert Browning span from the beginnings of his career to the end. They're about all sorts of things; some are more lighthearted while others are creepier and made me wonder "Why would he even think of this?".
Let's start off with what I didn't like.
Obviously, the language was very different from today's, and I had a little trouble comprehending the meaning of some of his poems. Thankfully, I'm have access to online summaries that help me understand them better. Additionally, some poems were a little boring for my taste, but the creepier ones... I really enjoyed those.
I finally got to read My Last Duchess! To be honest, it wasn't my favorite out of all his darker works. I thought it was okay, but it didn't hit off for me. My favorites were Porphyria's Lover and Evelyn Hope because they were waaaay more blatantly macabre than My Last Duchess. Porphyria's Lover is now one of my favorite poems. I LOVE the imagery in this one. Congrats Mr. Browning, you've made me giggle out loud as a man chokes his lover with her own hair!
Another one of my favorites is Amphibian. Browning, in the poem, muses about the beauty of nature. I felt transported to where he was as I read it. I also liked the imagery in this one.
Overall, pretty solid and slightly challenging read. I think it has something for everyone, but some of the poems (at least for me) were boring so I skim read them. Definitely not for people who can't stand poetry.
3/5

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not going to untangle the mess that Goodreads creates with titles like these, but let it be clear: this edition bears NO relation to any of the other editions grouped together under this title on this site. There's the Penguin, which is a much smaller selection than this one, and probably numerous free digital editions with varying standards of accuracy and editorial care, there's 19th century selected editions... and they're all totally different and oughtn't to be treated as one title by Goodreads. But good luck spending the time to separate all of them.
In any case, this is a Modern Library edition from 1951 that contains a fine introduction and boasts a much ampler selection of his poetry than any of the other editions I've seen (including the Penguin Selected and the Oxford UP's Major Works), as well as better paper and a nicer typography than those more recent selections. Any annotation is missing, though (and that of the OUP Major Works, for one thing, is excellent).
So there. Do pick it up if you come across this second hand at a fair price. Otherwise, there are good alternatives.
The poetry is excellent, of course. Or not, if you happen not to like Browning. That's the way it goes.

[Evergreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know who Robert Browning was until I had read The Dante Chamber by Matthew Pearl, however, I still didn't realize he was a nonfictional individual. I had started to do some research on the characters off of Pearl's novel and had grown interested in some of the poets' poems, like Robert Browning Christina Rosseti, etc. Even though The Dante Chamber was an entirely different book Pearl hit home on how loving and dictated Robert Browning was to his wife.
I loved reading the few poems Browning had written poems for his wife. My Star is my most favorite poem of Robert Browning. I wish to read more of his poems if I can more!

[Greg Hovanesian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note: I did not finish this book, I only got to page 143.

While I respect the poetry of Browning, I just don't think it's my cup of tea.

Some of his poems did grip me, but usually only for a little bit: his poems were usually a little too long for me to stay focused.

The exception was 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came', which was dark and beautiful. This poem has served as the inspiration for many works of literature, including Stephen King. But this particular poem wasn't written in the usual style of Robert Browning: most of his poems were of a much lighter style.

[Makayla MacGregor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Of the poetry I've read for school this year, this was my least favorite. I found it to be overly expository, and so focused on the incredibly subtle themes to the extent that it wasn't something that can be communicated to the reader without spending an entire few minutes on each stanza. That being said, IF you have the patience to study each line dutifully, the themes are interesting.

[Shelby Bollen]

I'm no expert when it comes to poetry and I'd go so far as to say that I know next to nothing about it. Usually in collections like this, a poem or two stand out to me but I didn't really care for any of them. I enjoyed the experience of exploring Browning's work and expanding my poetry world, but I doubt I'll be reading anything else by him in the future.

[Matt Vigneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a joy to read comprehensively. Loved it all - even the long poetry. Favorites: Pippa Passes, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, The Lost Leader, Tocatta of Galuppi's, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Mr Sludge (The Medium), and Wanting is - what?

[PRJ Greenwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I much preferred his shorter rhymes to the long, discursive ones, particularly like the Sludge which for mine, overstayed its welcome. This collection contains what is possibly his best-known work The Last Duchess.

[Amber Clover · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved reading the poems from this book. Didn't finish, but many of its poems came in use for me when I was doing a few of my class projects back in the days.

[Pieter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally hated it, but then grew to like it. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister still remains one of my favourite funny poems to this day. I also liked the long form poem about the painter(s).

[☾ Sarah ⋆⁺₊✧ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

weirdo man weirdo poetry hot wife

[Blane Rivera · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a poet !!!
Unlock my heart with a sonnet-key🫧🫧🫧

[nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

you would find more poetry on the side of a cereal box.

[Davis Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

6/2024: I've been reading Browning again lately, and I've just been awfully impressed by his work. There really is no one like him. He is truly a "poet's poet", a formal master who used some of the richest and most striking language ever employed in English. Up to the full five he goes. And he may now be my fifth favorite poet after Hopkins, Dickinson, Herbert, and Keats.

Browning probably has the most distinctive voice of any British poet. His work practically exists in its own cosmos. He has more than a foot in the cynical decadence of modernism—Stevens, early Eliot, et al.—with his masterfully ironic and/or darkly whimsical tone, oddball situational narratives, frequently abstruse points, embracing of the sheer voluptuousness of language, and exploration of cultural vicissitudes through the motley characters of the European world. But he is also somewhat of a medievalist, not only in his favored historical subject matters but in his vigorous narrative fluidity, fondness for alliteration, and ravishing outbursts of florid lyricism breaking forth at random from otherwise rather dry passages. And then of course, Chaucer was also obsessed with the motley characters of the European world, and maybe that whole tradition flows from him. How do you even begin to classify a poem like "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or "Popularity"? They're like nothing that has ever been written in terms of tone and intent. Of course, Browning's mastery of the monologue is undisputed, but too often I find these to simply be, for lack of a better word, confusing. I revel in Browning's improvisatory sense of rhapsody, but it can be a bit like reading Faulkner at his most unforgiving—if Faulkner had anything like a sense of humor, that is. In some of these, like "Caliban Upon Setebos" and "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", Browning is almost completely in the 20th century, while others, like "Apt Vogler" and "Fra Lippo Lippi", are philosophical tours de force. To be honest, I find his purest genius to shine forth when he's dealing with intimate domestic and romantic topics, in deeply moving poems like "Two in the Campagna," "The Last Ride Together," "By the Fireside", "Any Wife to Any Husband," and many of his shorter lyrics, which often have a remarkable diamond-cut perfection in their ability to capture fleeting, complex emotions. These are quasi-Metaphysical gems that preserve Browning's high invention but feel much less abstract and aloof than the monologues. Certainly the ultra-conscious artifice in Browning can get on my nerves, but he is a very great poet indeed, and the sheer impossibility of pinning him down makes him both very frustrating and highly rewarding for intensive study.

P.S. I have an old Riverside Edition of Browning's poetry, which also includes extensive selections from The Ring and the Book. I'm actually quite sad that these editions went out of print; they are quite complete and helpful.

[Eliaspallanzani · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'altra sera pensavamo ai tempi delle infinite discussioni notturne sui temi più astrusi e a un atteggiamento che allora ci sembrava comune, scontato, e che poi invece è praticamente scomparso, ma non riuscivamo a definirlo con precisione, pur rimpiangendolo. Ci girava in testa la parola "integrità" e ora per puro caso leggiamo questo:

"In passato, sicuramente per tutti i secoli del protestantesimo, l'idea di ribellione e quella di integrità intellettuale erano fuse insieme".

Ed è proprio quel che volevamo dire. Vent'anni fa, quando parlavamo con quegli amici, ci sentivamo e sentivamo che loro erano integri, oltre che ribelli: che non avevano altri fini. Potevamo permetterci quel lusso. Ma, continua l'articolo, "invece è peculiare alla nostra epoca che i ribelli contro l'ordine esistente, o comunque i più numerosi e tipici di essi, si rivoltino anche contro l'idea stessa di integrità intellettuale".

E anche questo ci sembra vero. Quel che più ci avvilisce è che per la maggior parte delle persone che conosciamo non riusciamo più a provare stima, a pensare che ciò che dicono corrisponde davvero a ciò che pensano, e loro stessi si fanno quasi un dovere di sottolineare che dicono quel che è opportuno dire, e che è impossibile per un adulto comportarsi diversamente.

"Cerco qui di discutere la tenace e pericolosa affermazione che la libertà sia indesiderabile e che l'onestà intellettuale rappresenti una forma di egoismo antisociale."
Orwell, 1945.