The Works of Robert Browning

Front Cover
Wordsworth Editions, 1994 - 698 pages

With an Introduction by Dr Tim Cook.

Robert Browning (1812-1889) represents the intellectual and argumentative strand in English poetry in contrast to the more ornate style of Spenser and Tennyson. His poetry demonstrates how a poet must be a sharp perceptive observer of the complexity of the human condition.

Perhaps his most moving poetry was written to express his feelings for his wife, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which he deals in a very 'modern' way with the uncomfortable fact that we can never quite bridge the gap between ourselves and the people we love.

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Contents

A FRAGMENT OF
1
PARACELSUS
14
A TRAGEDY
66
990
182
DRAMATIC LYRICSContd
207
SCENE THE PRESENCECHAMBER
296
241
312
MEMORABILIA
320
MEN AND WOMEN
492
PACCHIAROTTO AND HOW
522
LA SAISIAZ
554
THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC
565
FIRST SERIES
584
99
6
ACT IV
6
TRAY
8

ACT I
336
HOLYCROSS
353
99
359
39
371
CHRISTMASEVE AND EASTER
396
FANCIES
5
SORDELLO
11
NED BRATTS
472
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

Robert Browning was the son of a well-to-do clerk in the Bank of England. He was educated by private tutors and from his own reading in his father's library and elsewhere. Browning's first publication was Pauline (1833). The work made no stir at all. The following year Browning went to St. Petersburg and from there to Italy. On his return to England in 1835 he published Paracelsus, a dramatic poem based on the life of the fifteenth-century magician and alchemist. Browning next attempted a play. Strafford was the first of the poet's dramatic failures; it ran only five nights at Covent Garden in 1836. An obscure and difficult poem, Sordello, appeared in 1840. It did a great deal toward giving Browning a reputation for being unintelligible and for limiting the circles of his readers. The most important event in Browning's life occurred in 1846, when he married Elizabeth Barrett. The marriage brought a new lightness and openness of voice to Browning's verse during the next 21 years, resulting in the great dramatic monologues of Men and Women in 1855 and the epic The Ring and the Book in 1867. It is not that these are the most beautiful poems of the Victorian Age, but they are the most perceptive; they reveal more clearly the men and women who speak the monologues, and the poet who conceived them, than any comparable works of the century. In the last two decades of his life Browning produced only a few great poems but much were grotesque and fantastic. He turned, too, to translations and transcriptions from the Greek tragedies; in spite of some powerful passages, these were not highly successful Robert Browning died in Italy in 1889. His body lies in Westminster Abbey.

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