Robert Browning

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:41 pm

Robert
Browning

For
other uses, see Robert
Browning (disambiguation).

Robert Browning
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of Robert Browning in 1865
Born	7 May 1812 (1812-05-07) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], London, England
Died	12 December 1889(1889-12-12) (aged 77) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Italy
Occupation	Poet
Notable work(s)	The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Porphyria's Lover, The Ring and the Book, Men and Women, My Last Duchess
Influenced[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] · Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, And Robert Frost

Signature	[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Robert Browning (7 May
1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic
verse, especially [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], made him one of the
foremost [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] poets.

Early Years

Browning was born in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a suburb of London, England,
the first son of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His father was a well-paid
clerk for the Bank of
England, earning about £150 per year.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Browning’s paternal grandfather was a wealthy slave owner in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], but
Browning’s father was an [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Browning's father had been sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation. Revolted by
the slavery there, he returned to England. Browning’s mother was a
musician. He had one sister, Sarianna. It is rumoured that Browning's
grandmother, Margaret Tittle, was a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]-born [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] who had inherited a
plantation in St Kitts. Robert's father amassed a library of around 6,000
books, many of them rare. Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant
literary resources. His mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
as well as a talented musician. His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted,
became her brother's companion in his later years. His father encouraged his
interest in literature and the arts.

By twelve, Browning had
written a book of poetry which he later destroyed when no publisher could be
found. After attending several private schools, he began to be educated by a
tutor, having demonstrated a strong dislike for institutionalized education.
Browning was a good student, and by the age of fourteen he was fluent in
French, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Italian and Latin. He became a great admirer
of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], especially [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Following the precedent of Shelley,
Browning became an [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], both of which he gave up later. At the age of
sixteen, he attended University
College London but left after his first year. His mother’s staunch evangelical
faith prevented his studying at either Oxford
University or [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], both then open only to
members of the Church
of England. He had substantial musical ability and composed arrangements of
various songs.

Middle years

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Portraits
of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.

In 1845, Browning met [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], who lived as a
semi-invalid in her father's house in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
Gradually a significant romance developed between them, leading to their
elopement on 12 September 1846. The marriage was initially secret because Elizabeth's father
disapproved of marriage for any of his children. From the time of their
marriage, the Brownings lived in Italy,
first in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and then, within
a year, finding an apartment in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (now a
museum to their memory). Their only child, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
nicknamed "Penini" or "Pen", was born in 1849. In these years
Browning was fascinated by and learned hugely from the art and atmosphere of Italy. He
would, in later life, say that 'Italy
was my university'. Browning also bought a home in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] outside [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and in a cruel irony he
died on the day that the Town Council approved the purchase.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]'s poetry was known to
the cognoscenti from fairly early on in his life, but he remained
relatively obscure as a poet till his middle age. (In the middle of the
century, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] was much better
known). In Florence
he worked on the poems that eventually comprised his two-volume [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], for which he
is now well known; in 1855, however, when these were published, they made
little impact. It was only after his wife's death, in 1861, when he returned to
England and became part of
the London
literary scene, that his reputation started to take off. In 1868, after five
years work, he completed and published the long blank-verse poem [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
and finally achieved really significant recognition. Based on a convoluted
murder-case from 1690s Rome,
the poem is composed of twelve books, essentially ten lengthy dramatic poems
narrated by the various characters in the story, showing their individual
perspectives on events, 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 praised 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 forty years.