| REDEMPTIVE MOMENTS: THE POETRY OF ROBERT BROWNING 70,000 words PREFACE In the eleven chapters that follow, I shall explore the life and writings of one of England’s finest poets, Robert Browning. While his contemporary, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote poetry that embodied and celebrated the progressive ethos of the Victorian Age, Browning sought instead to perfect a new poetic genre that withdrew from the immediate concerns of his age to explore the tortured psyches of a vast gallery of rogues, hypocrites, and eccentrics who lived in various countries and at various times. The name of that genre was the dramatic monologue, and its purpose was (as in the great soliloquies of Shakespeare) to submerge the poet’s voice and ideals and allow instead the speaker of the poem to address us in his own unique language and from his own unique perspective. As the dramatic monologue is so central to Browning’s poetic career, I shall begin in Chapter One with a full analysis of this genre, as well as a biographical overview of how Browning developed from a Romantic poet in the passionate, over-self-conscious tradition of Shelley into the supreme master of a genre that calls for objectivity, restraint, and authorial distance. I shall also take a brief look at the main influences in his life and at the overall shape of his career (which varied from critical obscurity and even scorn to public lionization). At this point, I would normally move directly into Browning’s major monologues; however, as is well known, there is another side to Browning for which he is equally famous: namely, his courtship of the invalid poet, Elizabeth Barrett, and his remarkable decision to elope with her to Italy against the wishes of her tyrannical father. In acknowledgment of this most famous of literary romances, I shall devote three full chapters to the subject of the Brownings in love: Chapter Two will give a full and detailed account of their courtship, marriage, and life in Italy (along with an overview of Browning’s epic poem, The Ring and the Book, which was inspired in part by Elizabeth); Chapter Three will offer a close analysis of the sonnet sequence that Elizabeth wrote during their period of courtship to help her sort out her conflicting emotions, Sonnets from the Portuguese; Chapter Four will survey Browning’s major love lyrics, focusing not only on his unique way of expressing and embodying love in his poetry but on how specifically his marriage to Elizabeth impacted his thoughts on the subject of love. With Chapter Five, I will turn exclusively to Robert Browning, beginning with an analysis of his early play, Pippa Passes: a work in which many of the elements of the mature poet first appear. From here, I will move on in Chapter Six to consider four of Browning’s early dramatic monologues: “My Last Duchess,” “Porphyria’s Lover,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation.” These four brief but rich poems (whose speakers include a Renaissance Duke who has killed his wife for being too free-spirited and generous and a hypocritical monk whose major goal in life is to damn a simple, saintly fellow monk) shall act in part as a warm-up to Browning’s longer works and will introduce us to Browning’s ample skills of poetic compression: his ability, that is, to draw deft, incisive, remarkably nuanced portraits of his speakers in the space of only 60 lines. With these four poems as preface, I shall then move on in the final five lectures to offer close and detailed analyses of eight of Browning’s most brilliant, mature, and enduring poems: “The Bishop Orders his Tomb” (about an art-loving Bishop who can perceive spiritual truths only in physical terms), “Fra Lippo Lippi” (about an artist-monk living at the dawn of the Renaissance who yearns to paint the flesh and not just the spirit), “Andrea del Sarto” (about a failed artist who, though he possesses flawless technical skills, lacks vision and passion), “Caliban upon Setebos” (about a half-human beast who creates, in his own spiteful image, a cruel and arbitrary deity), “An Epistle of Karshish” (about an Arabian physician who has met the risen Lazarus and does not know what to make of him), “Cleon” (about a pagan Greek philosopher who yearns for, posits, and then rejects the possibility of a living, Incarnate deity), “Saul” (about how the young David, out of his love for Saul, arrives at a stunning, intensely moving prophecy of the coming Messiah), and Bishop Blougram’s Apology (about a hypocritical and worldly Bishop who yet has intimations of the divine). I shall begin this five-chapter study in Chapter Seven with a consideration of what separates Browning’s mature work from his earlier monologues (those discussed in Chapter Six). As we shall see, whereas his earliest speakers are generally villains in whom there is nothing ennobling, redemptive, or even human, Browning’s later speakers (even the most depraved) all possess within them a seed of redemption, a spark of humanity that contains within it the real (if slight) possibility of emotional and spiritual regeneration. These seeds of redemption generally come in the form of a sudden flash of insight, a visionary moment when all seems clear, and truth, beauty, and grace seem attainable. It will be one of the main burdens of Chapters 7-11 to identify,
discuss, and experience each of these redemptive moments. TO READ A SLIGHTLY MODIFIED VERISION OF CHAPTER TEN OF THIS BOOK, PLEASE CLICK HERE. # As I hope the diction and tone of the above paragraphs make clear, this book is aimed squarely at the layman. Although Appendix II offers an extensive annotated bibliography of works by and about Browning, the chapters themselves are free of all notes and unfamiliar critical jargon. It is my hope that all who read this book will feel challenged and invited to enter directly into dialogue with Browning and the speakers of his dramatic monologues. In fact, as I state in Appendix II, I have chosen to confine my selections of Browning’s poetry to those which appear in a single, inexpensive, easily accessible anthology: the Norton Critical Edition of Robert Browning’s
Poetry, edited by James F. Loucks. By doing so, I hope that the reader, armed with this single anthology, will be able to wrestle alongside me as I delve deep into the aesthetic and thematic richness of Browning’s poetry.Too often, readers of poetry fail to engage fully the issues raised in the poems they read. Either their interest is confined to learning about the life of the poet and how that life is reflected in the poetry, or they are prevented from a full engagement with the work by their prior (often unconscious) commitment to a socio-political agenda or to a modern-postmodern theoretical approach. In constructing the chapters below and the close poetic analyses around which most of them are organized, I have emulated not the work of modern academic scholars but that of a slightly earlier body of critics and essayists who used to bear the collective title of “men of letters”: Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, E. B. White, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Mark Van Doren, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, etc. Although I am by graduate training a Professor of 19th century English poetry, the approach I take in this book is more that of a generalist than a specialist, more that of a humanist than of an academic technician. In contrast to the almost exclusively secular, relativistic, and multicultural approaches taken in our large liberal research universities, I insist in my analysis of Browning and his poems on 1) taking seriously (rather than condescendingly) Browning’s Christian faith and worldview, 2) positing Browning’s work as a source of wisdom (rather than a socio-economic product) from which we can learn real, enduring, transcendent truths, and 3) presenting the poems in such a way as to challenge my readers to reassess their own beliefs, actions, and decisions. Poetry (especially Browning’s poetry) is serious business, a seriousness that I respect, not by forcing the poems to pay homage to our own modern and postmodern agendas, but by letting them speak to us across the span of a century-and-a-half with all their rough-hewn vigor and all their strange, troubling beauty intact. | ||