Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

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

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)
          o \"Porphyria\'s Lover\"
          o \"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister\"
          o \"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)
          o \"How They Brought the Good News from
Ghent to Aix\"
          o \"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)
          o \"A Toccata of Galuppi\'s\"
          o \"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came\"
          o \"Fra Lippo Lippi\"
          o \"Andrea Del Sarto\"
          o \"A Grammarian\'s Funeral\"
          o \"An Epistle Containing the Strange
Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab
Physician\"
    * Dramatis Personae (1864)
          o \"Caliban upon Setebos\"
          o \"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)