Robert Browning

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell, England and died on 12 December, 1889 in Venice. His mother was an accomplished pianist and a devout evangelical Christian. His father, who worked as a bank clerk, was also an artist, scholar, antiquarian, and collector of books and pictures.

His importance comes from his dramatic verses, he is well known as the author of objective poetry. The peculiar characteristics of Browning’s poetic style are (as we can read on the book “Luis Cernuda and the modern English poets”, Chapter 2: Cernuda and Browning by Brian Hughes): a racy, colloquial diction, closely imitating the rhythms of everyday, sometimes even popular speech; an occasional highly personalised compression of the phrasing to convey the rapidity of thought in active minds moved, use of the form of the dramatic monologue, which Browning may virtually be said to have invented, at least in his characteristic adaptation of this form to the lyric poem, etc.

To these features of style may be added the constant preoccupation with moral questions, and the innate tendency of the Victorian poet to speak through personae, rather than in his own voice, in a effort to body forth the act of self-awareness,, which as Browning himself phrased it, as well less “character in action” than “action in character” (the notion of the objective poet). In the preface to “Sordello”, he centred his interest on “incidents in the development of a soul”, adding: “little else is worth study”.

As Cernuda noticed, Browning’s poetry was often a self-projection of the emotional experiences on to a dramatic, historic or legendary situation with the purpose of being more objective.

Browning who, after all, was writing dramatic lyrics and not poetic drama, used his personae as masks to represent different points of view, in the end converging on the three or four questions that Browning thought most important: the nature of love, the nature of good and evil, the nature of God, and the inevitable, disruptive presence of death.

Browning, at the end, (as we can read on “Victorian prose and poetry” by Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom) was a kind of psychological atomist, like Blake, Balzac, Proust, Kafka, Lawrence, Yeats, and some other modern innovators. In his work, older conceptions of personality disappear, and a more incoherent individual continuity is allowed to the chasm between his own inner and outer selves had become, his art constantly explores the multiplicity of selves that inhabit apparently single, unitary personalities some of them not at all unlike some of his own. Each of his men and women is at least several men and women, and his lovers learn that we can never embrace any person at a time, but only the whole of an incoherence, the cluster of voices and beings that jostles in any separate ways.

References:

 

-         “Luis Cernuda and the modern English poets”, Chapter 2: Cernuda and Browning, Brian Hughes, Univ. de Alicante.  

-         “Victorian prose and poetry”, Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom, The Oxford Anthology of English Literature.

-         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning - The well known Wikipedia.

-         http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/182 - A poet web from the Academy of American poets.