Robert Browning

He was born in Camberwell, Surrey, the only son of Robert and Sarah Browning. Despite his father being only a bank clerk, he was raised in a household that had a library of 6000 books. His mother was a devout Nonconformist, and they lived simply, but his father encouraged Robert's interest in literature and the arts.

He was a rapid learner and by the age of 14 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 became an atheist and a vegetarian, but in later life he looked back on this as a passing phase. At age 16 he attended University College, London but dropped out after his first year.

In 1833, Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession, was published anonymously, and marked the beginning of his career as a poet. Having become friendly with a Russian diplomat, he had the opportunity to visit St Petersburg, and this journey was an inspiration to him.

His works include:

• Paracelsus (1835)
• Sordello (1840)
• Pippa Passes (play) (1841)
• Dramatic Lyrics (1842)

"Porphyria's Lover"

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"

"My Last Duchess"

• Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)

"How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent"

"The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church"

• 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"

• Collected Poems (1862)
• Dramatis Personae (1864)

"Caliban upon Setebos"

"Rabbi Ben Ezra"

• The Ring and the Book (1869)
• The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1888

In 1846, he married secretly Elizabeth Barrett, a semi-invalid, and they made their home in Italy. Their son, Robert, was born in Florence in 1849. Following Elizabeth's death in 1861, Browning and his son returned to London. He became romantically involved with Lady Ashburton, but did not re-marry. In 1878, he returned to Italy, and spent summer holidays there on several occasions.

His remains can be found in Westminster Abbey.

Oscar Wilde said of Robert Browning:

(Taken from a Project Gutenberg text)

Taken as a whole the man was great. He did not belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the Titan. He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could sing. His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from emotion to form, but from thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machine makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he wounds us by monstrous music. Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh. Yet, he was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made from it men and women that live. He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare. If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, and speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the pageant of his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks still burning from some girl's hot kiss. There, stands dread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban. Mildred Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed's. The spawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima's haggard face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself. Pale as the white satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go down. Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As a poet? Ah, not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what more should an artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside him. The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.--The Critic as Artist