| Place of Residence/Importance: | Born near London. Lived in Italy with his wife for 15 years. Then lived in London for his remaining 28 years. |
| School/Period | Victorian age (1832-1901) |
| Techniques or Genres. | Poetry. Most well known for dramatic monologues. Many consider him a transitional figure, moving from the age of Victoria to the twentieth century. Innovative with stanza forms, such as "Love among the Ruins." Some consider him a religious and moral teacher. The dramatic monologues "enable the reader, speaker, and poet to be located at an appropriate distance from one another, aligned in such a way that readers must work throughthe words of the speaker toward the meaning of the poet" by himself or herself. (By the way, the emailed story "What I have learned" works as Norton describes "My last Duchess" to do.) In many ways Browning was not of a kind with Tennyson and other Victorians who emphasized "smoothly polished texture and pleasing liquidity of sound" (1233)--Instead, Browning drew on Donne, Shakespeare, Chaucer--often harshly discordant, using unexpected juxtapositions that startle us into an awareness of a world of everyday realities and trivialities. "prosiness." (1234) |
| Themes | Researching to provide specificity to the Monologues. "Madhouse Cells" and other monologue collections focus on specific historical personages or stories, kind of like Webster's "The White Divel", with complex personalities that are pretty believable. Though he was (following Shelley) an atheist for a time, he recovered :-) and sometimes later was moral and religious. But his characters are devious and shallow and petty and hypocritical. "Caliban Upon Setebos" deals with Darwinism and 'natural religions' (see Blake). Norton suggests that the most recurrent 'real' idea presented in the monologues was the idea that "God has created an imperfect world as a kind of testing ground, a 'vale of soul-making,' as Keats had said." (1233) So heaven must be perfect, and the human soul must be immortal. Whee hee. |
| Topics of the poems. | People who are crazy or antisocial. Sometimes, as in "How they Brought. . ." Browning takes historial circumstances but makes up the particulars (he says that this poem is fictional, related to a battle that hadn't really happened); this is different somewhat from Tennyson's 'current events' numbers like "Charge of the Light Brigade" which were for newspapers. |
| Major Works | Porphyria's Lover
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister My Last Duchess How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church Love Among the Ruins "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" A Grammarian's Funeral Youth and Art Fra Lippo Lippi An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician. (based on the story of Lazarus, Karshish met Lazarus and he thinks that the 'Nazarene physician or leech' taught something strange about God's love.) Caliban Upon Setebos Abt Vogler (German musician and inventor--sounds like an organ improvisation--about the ephemerality of such pieces, and the possible relation to God's purposes on Heaven and Earth (1302).) To Edward FitzGerald The Ring and the Book Personae |
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Often called "Mrs. Browning's Husband." (She was more famous than he during her life) His dad was a bank clerk with a good library; his mom loved music. He stayed at home most of the time till his marriage when he was 34! Read omnivorously; learned languages. Failed at several dramas before starting his dramatic monologues. Also wrote very confessionally, in Shelley's mode, and was criticised by John Stuart Mill for being in a 'morbid state' of self-worship. Then he tried to swear off being too personal. His wife, Elizabeth Barrett, was 6 years older than him, and a semi-invalid, but he swept her off, eloping to Italy, where they had a swell life for 15 years till she died. He took their one kid, a boy, with him to London to finish off his life. |
| Notable Quote | "I've married a rich old lord, / And you're dubbed knight and an R. A. / Each life unfulfilled, you see; / It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: / We have not sighed deep, laughed free, / Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy." --"Youth and Art, 1860 |
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Works on the List:
Porphyria's Lover
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
My Last Duchess
How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix
The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church
Love Among the Ruins
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
A Grammarian's Funeral
Youth and Art
Notes derived from the Norton Anthology of British Literature, Volume II. Fifth Edition.