Robert Browning

Robert Browning

Infobox Writer
name = Robert Browning


caption =
birthdate = 7 May 1812
birthplace = Camberwell, London England
deathdate = 12 December 1889
deathplace = Venice, Italy
occupation =
movement =
genre =
notableworks =
influences =
influenced =

Robert Browning (7 May 1812 - 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.

Youth

Browning was born in Camberwell, [ [http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/rbbio.html >Robert Browning - Biography ] ] a suburb of London, England, on 7 May 1812, the first son of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His father was a man of both fine intellect and character, who worked as a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England. Robert's father amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them obscure and arcane. Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources. His mother, with whom he was ardently bonded, was a devout Nonconformist as well as extremely musically talented. He had a younger sister, also gifted, who became the companion in her brother's later years. As a family unit they lived simply, and his father encouraged his interest in literature and the Arts.

In childhood, he was distinguished by a love of poetry and natural history. By twelve, he 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 fast 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. Following the precedent of Shelley, Browning became an atheist and vegetarian, both of which he later shed. At age sixteen, he attended University College London, but left after his first year. His mother’s staunch evangelical faith circumscribed the pursuit of his studying at either Oxford University or Cambridge University, then both only open to members of the Church of England. He had substantial musical ability and he composed arrangements of various songs.

Middle life

In 1845, Browning met Elizabeth Barrett, who lived as a semi-invalid and virtual prisoner in her father's house in Wimpole Street. Gradually a significant romance developed between them, leading to their secret marriage and flight in 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 Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence which they called Casa Guidi (now a museum to their memory). Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, 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'. The Brownings also bought a home in Asolo, in the Veneto outside Venice, and in a cruel irony the poet Browning died on the day that the Town Council approved the purchase. [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9501EFD61F31E233A2575AC0A9619C946396D6CF Barrett Browning Dies at Asolo, Italy; Artist, son of the Poets, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, obituary, The New York Times, 9 July 1912] ]

Browning'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, Tennyson was much better known.) In Florence he worked on the poems that eventually comprised his two-volume "Men and Women", 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 "The Ring and the Book", and finally achieved really significant recognition. Based on a convoluted murder-case from 1690s Rome, the poem is composed of twelve books, 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 forty years of work.

Late life

In the remaining years of his life he traveled extensively and frequented London. Few of his later poems 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 early 1870s, of which "Fifine at the Fair" and "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" were the best-received, 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.

According to some reports Browning became romantically involved with Lady Ashburton, but did not re-marry. In 1878, he returned to Italy for the first time in the seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several occasions.

The Browning Society was formed for the appreciation of his works in 1881.

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). He died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December 1889, the same day "Asolando" was published, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.

Browning's poetic style

Browning’s fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the speaker’s character. Unlike a soliloquy, the meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently "gives away" about himself in the process of rationalizing past actions, or "special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor in the poem. Rather than thinking out loud, the character composes a self-defense which the reader, as "juror," is challenged to see through. Browning chooses some of the most debased, extreme and even criminally psychotic characters, no doubt for the challenge of building a sympathetic case for a character who doesn't deserve one and to cause the reader to squirm at the temptation to acquit a character who may be a homicidal psychopath. One of his more sensational dramatic monologues is "Porphyria's Lover." The opening lines provide a sinister setting for the macabre events that follow. It is plain that the speaker is insane, as he strangles his lover with her own hair to try and preserve for ever the moment of perfect love she has shown him.

Yet it is by carefully reading the far more sophisticated and cultivated rhetoric of the aristocratic and civilized Duke of "My Last Duchess," perhaps the most frequently cited example of the poet's dramatic monologue form, that the attentive reader discovers the most horrific example of a mind totally mad despite its eloquence in expressing itself. The duchess, we learn, was murdered not because of infidelity, not because of a lack of gratitude for her position, and not, finally, because of the simple pleasures she took in common everyday occurrences. She's reduced to an objet d'art in the Duke's collection of paintings and statues because the Duke equates his instructing her to behave like a duchess with "stooping," an action of which his megalomaniacal pride is incapable. In other monologues, such as "Fra Lippo Lippi," Browning takes an ostensibly unsavory or immoral character and challenges us to discover the goodness, or life-affirming qualities, that often put the speaker's contemporaneous judges to shame. In "The Ring and the Book" Browning writes an epic-length poem in which he justifies the ways of God to humanity through twelve extended blank verse monologues spoken by the principals in a trial about a murder. These monologues greatly influenced many later poets, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the latter singling out in his "Cantos" Browning's convoluted psychological poem about a frustrated 13-century troubadour, "Sordello", as the poem he must work to distance himself from.

Ironically, Browning’s style, which seemed modern and experimental to Victorian readers, owes much to his love of the seventeenth century poems of John Donne with their abrupt openings, colloquial phrasing and irregular rhythms. But he remains too much the prophet-poet and descendant of Percy Shelley to settle for the conceits, puns, and verbal play of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His is a modern sensibility, all too aware of the arguments against the vulnerable position of one of his simple characters, who recites: "God's in His Heaven; All's right with the world." Browning endorses such a position because he sees an immanent deity that, far from remaining in a transcendent heaven, is indivisible from temporal process, assuring that in the fullness of theological time there is ample cause for celebrating life. Browning's is assuredly at once the most incarnate and dynamic of deities, in Christianity and perhaps in any of the world's great religions.

History of sound recording

Browning was the first person to ever have his voice heard after his death. On a recording [http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1545] made by Thomas Edison in 1889, Browning reads "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" (including apologizing when he forgets the words). It was first played in Venice in 1890.Fact|date=December 2007

Cultural references

The last two lines of the famous "Song" from "Pippa Passes" — "God's in his heaven, All's right with the world!" — are parodied in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" with the hypnopaedic slogan: - "Ford's in his flivver, all's right with the world!" Browning's lines are also used in the Japanese animations Neon Genesis Evangelion, RahXephon, Black Lagoon, and Darker than Black. In another Japanese animation, R.O.D. the T.V., the final line is a take off stating "The Paper's in her heaven, All's right in the world."
John Lennon's song "Grow Old with Me", which was inspired by Browning's's poem "Rabbi ben Ezra", appears on Lennon's album "Milk and Honey".
Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series was inspired by Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came".

In the Get Carter remake, at the opening of the film, the quote "That's all we can expect of man, this side of the grave; his good is ... knowing he is bad" is shown on the screen.

The "Songs From A Dazzling Drift" album by folk musician Yo Zushi is named after a line from Browning's poem, "Women and Roses".
Anthony Powell used Browning's work for the titles of two of his novels: "What's Become of Waring" (1939) inspired by "Waring" from "Dramatic Lyrics" and "The Soldier's Art", part of the "A Dance to the Music of Time" sequence, named for a line from "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came".

Issac Asimov's first novel, Pebble In The Sky used a slightly altered form of Rabbi Ben Ezra as a theme for the book, recited and often considered by the main character.

In Season 4, Episode 5 of the X-Files: "The Field Where I Died"(1996), Mulder reads lines from "Paracelsus" at the beginning and end of the episode.

Browning is referenced in the Klaatu song Magentalane 46 seconds in to the song."Now let me see well shouldn't I make a speech Or say something in Greek Perhaps recite a Browning poem, but why"

In the Frasier episode Good Grief, Frasier Crane tries to write an operetta on the Brownings.

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)
**"Porphyria's Lover"
**"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
**"My Last Duchess"
**"The Pied Piper of Hamelin"
**"Johannes Agricola in Meditation"
* "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)
**"The Laboratory"
**"How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"
**"The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church"
* "Bells and Pomegranates No. VIII: Luria "and" A Soul's Tragedy" (plays) (1846)
* "Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day" (1850)
* "Men and Women" (1855)
**"Love Among the Ruins"
**"The Last Ride Together"
**"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"
* "Dramatis Personae" (1864)
**"Caliban upon Setebos"
**"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)
* "Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper" (1876)
* "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus" (1877)
* "La Saisiaz" and "The Two Poets of Croisic" (1878)
* "Dramatic Idylls" (1879)
* "Dramatic Idylls: Second Series" (1880)
* "Jocoseria" (1883)
* "Ferishtah's Fancies" (1884)
* "Parleyings with Certain People of Importance In Their Day" (1887)
* "Asolando" (1889)

Timeline

ImageSize = width:450 height:450PlotArea = left:50 right:0 bottom:10 top:10

DateFormat = yyyyPeriod = from:1810 till:1890TimeAxis = orientation:vertical ScaleMajor = unit:year increment:5 start:1810ScaleMinor = unit:year increment:1 start:1810

PlotData= color:red mark:(line,black) align:left fontsize:S shift:(25,0) # shift text to right side of bar

# there is no automatic collision detection, fontsize:XS # so shift texts up or down manually to avoid overlap shift:(25,-10)

at:1812 text:Born in Camberwell at:1835 text:Publishes Paracelsus at:1840 shift:(25,-5) text:Publishes Sordello at:1841 text:Publishes Bells and Pomegranates at:1846 text:Marries Elizabeth Barrett from:1846 till:1861 text:Lives chiefly in Italy at:1861 text:Elizabeth dies; ~ Robert returns to England, continues to write at:1864 text:Publishes Dramatis Personae at:1869 text:Publishes The Ring and the Book at:1889 text:Publishes Asolando; dies.

ee also

* Elizabeth Barrett Browning

References

*DeVane, William Clyde. "A Browning handbook". 2nd. Ed. (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955)
*Drew, Philip. "The poetry of Robert Browning: A critical introduction." (Methuen, 1970)
*Hudson, Gertrude Reese. "Robert Browning's literary life from first work to masterpiece." (Texas, 1992)
*Karlin, Daniel. "The courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett." (Oxford, 1985)
*Kelley, Philip et al. (Eds.) "The Brownings' correspondence." 15 vols. to date. (Wedgestone, 1984-) (Complete letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, so far to 1849.)
*Maynard, John. "Browning's youth." (Harvard Univ. Press, 1977)
*Chesterton, G.K. "Robert Browning" (1903)

External links

* [http://www.blackcatpoems.com/b/robert_browning.html Poems by Robert Browning]
* [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=891 Poems by Robert Browning at PoetryFoundation.org]
* [http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/182 Robert Browning biography and select bibliography]
* [http://www.browningguide.com/ The Brownings: A Research Guide (Baylor University)]
* [http://www.browningsociety.org/ The Browning Society]
* [http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/british_poets/robert/ Short Biography and Poems]
*
* [http://www.sanjeev.net/poetry/browning-robert/index.html Poetry Archive: 135 poems of Robert Browning]
*
* [http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1545 A recording] of Browning reciting five lines from "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"
* [http://www.classicistranieri.com/english/indexes/autho.htm Works by Robert Browning] in e-book
* [http://www.shvoong.com/books/481319-home-thoughts-abroad/ An analysis of "Home Thoughts, From Abroad"]


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