Robert Browning

Robert Browning (May 7, 1812 – December 12, 1889) was an English poet and playwright.

Contents

1 Early life 2 Publication 3 Marriage 4 Late success 5 Complete list of works 6 Summary 7 See also 8 External Links

Early life

He was born in Camberwell, Surrey, the second son of Robert and Sarah Wiedemann Browning. His father was a man of fine intellect and equally fine character, who worked as a well-paid clerk in the Bank of England and so managed to amass a library of around 6000 books — many of them highly obscure and arcane. Thus Robert was raised in a household with a good literary resource. His mother, to whom he was ardently attached, was a devout Nonconformist, the daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee, and was alike intellectually and morally worthy of his affection. The only other member of the family was a younger sister, also highly gifted, who was the sympathetic companion of his later years. They lived simply, but his father encouraged Robert's interest in literature and the arts.

In his childhood he was distinguished by his love of poetry and natural history. At 12 he had written a book of poetry which he destroyed when he could not find a publisher. After being at one or two private schools, and showing an insuperable dislike to school life, he was educated by a tutor.

He was a rapid learner and by the age of fourteen was fluent in French, Greek, Italian, and Latin as well as his native English. He became a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. In imitation of the latter, he briefly became an atheist and a vegetarian, but in later life he looked back on this as a passing phase. At age sixteen he attended University College, London, but dropped out after his first year.

Through his mother he inherited some musical talent, and composed settings, for various songs.

Publication

In March 1833, Browning's Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession was published anonymously by Saunders and Otley, in many ways a vanity publication financed by his family, and this marked the beginning of his career as a poet. A lengthy confessional poem, it was intended by its young author to be merely one of a series of works produced by various fictitious versions of himself (the poet, the composer, etc.), but Browning abandoned the larger project. He was much embarrassed by Pauline in later life, contributing a somewhat contrite preface to the 1868 edition of his Collected Poems asking for his readers' indulgence when reading what in his eyes was practically a piece of juvenalia, before undertaking extensive revisions to the poem in time for the 1888 edition, with the remark "twenty years' endurance of an eyesore seems long enough".

In 1834 he paid his first visit to Italy, in which so much of his future life was to be passed.

In 1835, Browning wrote the lengthy dramatic poem Paracelsus, essentially a series of monologues spoken by the Swiss doctor and alchemist Paracelsus and his friends. Published under Browning's own name, in an edition financed by his father, the poem was a small commercial and critical success and gained the notice of Carlyle, Wordsworth, and other men of letters, giving him a reputation as a poet of distinguished promise. Around this time the young poet was very much in demand in literary circles for his ready wit and flamboyant sense of style, and he embarked upon two ill-considered ventures: a series of plays for the theatre, all of which were dismally unsuccessful and none of which are much remembered today, and Sordello, a very lengthy poem in blank verse on the subject of an obscure feud in medieval northern Italy. Full of obscure references and verbose language, the poem became something of a scapegoat for critics' anti-Browning sentiments, and the young poet was made an object of derision and shunned by many of the literati. The effect on Browning's career was catastrophic, and he would not recover his good public standing — and the good sales that accompanied it — until the publication of The Ring and the Book nearly thirty years later.

Throughout the early 1840s he continued to publish volumes of plays and shorter poems, under the general series title Bells and Pomegranates. Although the plays, with the exception of Pippa Passes — in many ways more of a dramatic poem than an actual play — are almost entirely forgotten, the volumes of poetry (Dramatic Lyrics, first published in 1842, and 1845's Dramatic Romances and Lyrics) are often considered to be among the poet's best work, containing many of his most well-known poems. Though much admired now, the volumes were largely ignored at the time in the wake of the Sordello debacle.

Marriage

In early 1845, Browning began corresponding with Elizabeth Barrett, a semi-invalid, and the two conducted a secret courtship away from the eyes of her domineering father before marrying in secret in 1846 - a union of ideal happiness - and eloping to Italy. Their son, the painter and critic Robert Wiedemann Browning, known to the family as "Pen", was born in Florence in 1849. The Brownings continued to write and publish poetry from their Italian home throughout the 1850s, with Elizabeth far outshadowing Robert in both critical and commercial reception. Robert Browning's first published work since marriage was the lengthy religious piece Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, published in 1850. Men and Women, a series of fifty dramatic poems recited by fifty different fictional and historical characters, with a fifty-first, "One Word More", featuring Browning himself as the narrator and dedicated to his wife, was published in 1855. Men and Women — its title taken from a line in his wife's Sonnets from the Portuguese — is generally considered his most successful collection by modern critics, and many have singled it out as one of the finest books published in Victorian England, but the collection elicited little response when first published and sales remained poor.

Following Elizabeth's death in 1861, Browning and his son returned to London, paying, however, frequent visits to Italy. When his first new work in nine years, Dramatis Personae, was published in 1864, Browning's reputation was undergoing a critical and popular re-evaluation; a collected edition of his poetry published the previous year had sold reasonably well, as had a number of volumes of selected poems. Dramatis Personae was a collection of eighteen poems, many of which were somewhat darker in tone than those found in Men and Women, the central theme again being dramatic poems narrated by historical, literary and fictional characters. The religious controversies of the time, as well as the depiction of marital distress, increasingly came to the fore of Browning's work. Dramatis Personae was the first volume of Browning poetry to sell well enough to merit a second edition, though sales were still hardly spectacular. His literary status was recognised by the award of an honorary fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford in 1867.

Late success

In 1868, Browning finally completed and published the long blank verse poem The Ring and the Book, which would finally make him rich, famous and successful, and which ensured his critical reputation among the first rank of English poets. Based on a convoluted murder case from 1690s Rome, the poem is composed of twelve volumes, essentially comprising ten lengthy dramatic poems narrated by the various characters in the story showing their individual take on events as they transpire, bookended by an introduction and conclusion by Browning himself. Extraordinarily long even by Browning's own standards (over twenty thousand lines), The Ring and the Book was the poet's most ambitious project and has been hailed as a tour de force of dramatic poetry. Published separately in four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869, the poem was a huge success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought and deserved for nearly thirty years of work.

With his fame and fortune secure, Browning again became the prolific writer he had been at the start of his career. In the remaining twenty years of his life, as well as travelling extensively and frequenting London literary society again, he managed to publish no less than fifteen new volumes. None of these later works gained the popularity of The Ring and the Book, and they are largely unread today. However, Browning's later work has been undergoing a major critical re-evaluation in recent years, and much of it remains of interest for its poetic quality and psychological insight. After a series of long poems published in the 1870s — of which Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country are the most interesting — Browning again turned to shorter poems. The volume Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper included a spiteful attack against Browning's critics, especially the later Poet Laureate Alfred Austin. 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. Once more, the Victorian public was baffled by this, and Browning returned to the short, concise lyric for his last volume, Asolando (1889).

According to some reports Browning became romantically involved with Lady Ashburton in the 1870s, but did not re-marry. In 1878, he returned to Italy for the first time since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several occasions. He died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice during December 1889, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.

Complete list of works

• Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
• Paracelsus (1835)
• 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)
  • "Porphyria's Lover"
  • "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
  • "My Last Duchess"
• 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)
  • "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"
  • "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church"
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VIII: Luria and A Soul's Tragedy (plays) (1846)
• The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1849)
• Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)
• Men and Women (1855)
  • "A Toccata of Galuppi's"
  • "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
  • "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)
  • "Caliban upon Setebos"
  • "Rabbi Ben Ezra"
• The Ring and the Book (1868-9)
• Balaustion's Adventure (1871)
• Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871)
• Fifine at the Fair (1872)
• Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or, Turf and Towers (1873)
• Aristophanes' Apology (1875)
• The Inn Album (1875)
• Pachiarotto, And How He Worked in Distemper (1876)
• The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877)
• La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878)
• Dramatic Idyls (1879)
• Dramatic Idyls: Second Series (1880)
• Jocoseria (1883)
• Ferishtah's Fancies (1884)
• Parleyings with Certain People of Importance In Their Day (1887)
• Asolando: Facts and Fancies (1889)

Summary

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 at:1812             text:Born in Camberwell
 at:1835             text:Publishes Paracelsus
 at:1840 shift:(25,-5) text:Publishes Sordello
 at:1841             text:Publishes Bells and Pomegranates
 at:1846             text:Marries to Elizabeth Barrett
 from:1846 till:1861 text:Lives chiefly in Italy
 at:1861             text:Elizabeth dies; ~ Robert returns to England, continues to write
 at:1869             text:Publishes Dramatis Personae; Ring and Book
 at:1889             text:Publishes Asolando; dies.

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See also

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning

External Links

Template:Wikiquote

• Robert Browning Bio and Poems (http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=185)
• Short Biography and Poems (http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/br/robert/)de:Robert Browning

es:Robert Browning fr:Robert Browning he:רוברט בראונינג pl:Robert Browning