Context
Robert Browning was born in 1812, the son of fairly liberal parents who took an
interest in his education and personal growth. He read voraciously as a youth,
and began to write poetry while still quite young, influenced by Percy Bysshe
Shelley, whose radicalism urged a rethinking of modern society.
However, Browning's earliest works garnered him some negative attention for
their expression of strong sensations their morbid tone. Thus for a time he set
poetry aside to work on plays, finding in their fictional world an apt space for
experimentation and development as a creative mind. Most of the plays did not
find success, however, and Browning turned back again to verse.
Browning's first important poem was the lengthy Paracelsus, which
appeared in 1835. Really a long dramatic monologue, the poem described the
career of the sixteenth-century alchemist, and achieved popular success,
establishing Browning as a familiar name with the reading public, if not yet as
a great poet. In 1841 Browning put out Pippa Passes, a loosely
structured set of poems that draw from the sensationalism of modern media. This
was followed by 1842's Dramatic Lyrics and 1845's Dramatic Romances
and Lyrics. Along with the 1855 volume Men and Women and the 1864
book Dramatis Personae, these two collections, although not wild
successes, contain most of the poems today considered central to the Browning
canon. But the poet achieved true literary stardom with the publication of his
verse novel The Ring and the Book, a historical tragedy based on a group
of documents Browning had found at an Italian bookseller's. The work appeared
in installments from 1868 to 1869, and Browning societies soon sprang up all
over England, rocketing Browning into a fame he enjoyed until his death in 1889.
Just as Browning's professional life centered around this crucial publication,
so, too did his personal life center around a crucial relationship. Following
the appearance of her celebrated first collection, Browning had begun
corresponding with the poet Elizabeth Barrett, a semi-invalid who lived in the
home of her extremely protective father. Not long after their first face-to-
face meeting, the two poets married in secret and fled to Italy, where they
lived until Elizabeth's death in 1861. During this time critics considered
Elizabeth much the finer poet, and scholars even proposed her as a candidate for
poet laureate when William Wordsworth died (Alfred
Tennyson received the honor instead). Although Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's work still receives much scholarly attention, Robert
Browning's subtle, detail-oriented poems have proven attractive to modern
critics, and he has now replaced his wife as the Browning of favor.
Browning lived and wrote during a time of major societal and intellectual
upheaval, and his poems reflect this world. England was becoming increasingly
urban, and newspapers daily assaulted the senses with splashy tales of crime and
lust in the city. Many people began to lose faith in religion as various new
scientific theories rocked society--most notably Charles
Darwin's theory of evolution, articulated in his 1859 The
Origin of Species, and many questioned the old bases of morality. Just as
religion and science were shifting in their roles, so, too, was art: artists and
critics were moving toward what would become the "art for art's sake" movement
at the end of the nineteenth century. Browning responded to these cultural
upheavals in the 1840s and '50s with poems in which he explores the relationship
of morality to art, and the conflict between aesthetics and didacticism. Mid-
19th-century Britain experienced economic turmoil as well: wealth and
consumption were on the rise at the same time that poverty soared, and the need
to reconcile these two facts finds an analogue in the struggle to decide between
material beauty--often manifested in luxurious furnishings, decorations,
ornament, and clothing--and morality--in the form of a concern for the poor.
Browning explores all of these issues in his poetry, even though he sets many of
them in the Renaissance or other distant historical periods; this is part of his
way of achieving relevance while never becoming moralistic or overly strident.
But Browning's genius lay not so much in his choice of subject matter or
setting, but in his craftsmanship: the fascination of his poetry owes to his
strong portrayal of characters and his wealth of detail.
