Robert Browning (1812–1889) was a Victorian poet and the master of the dramatic monologue, poems in which a single character reveals himself while speaking to a silent listener, as in My Last Duchess. Author of Men and Women and The Ring and the Book, he is also remembered for his romance with the poet Elizabeth Barrett.
Works
Bells and Pomegranates, Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, Men and Women
A self-educated poet
Robert Browning was born in 1812 in Camberwell, then a village south of London. His father, a clerk at the Bank of England with a library of some six thousand books, encouraged his precocious son, who learned largely at home and spent only a few months at the new University of London.
Inspired by Shelley, he published his first long poem, Pauline, anonymously in 1833; it sold not a single copy. Paracelsus earned him some praise, but Sordello, published in 1840, was so obscure that it became a standing joke and harmed his reputation for decades.
Robert and Elizabeth
In January 1845 Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett, a famous poet who lived as an invalid in her father's house in Wimpole Street, to tell her that he loved her verses and, he added, her. After a correspondence of nearly six hundred letters and many visits, they married secretly in September 1846 and left for Italy a week later.
They settled in Florence, in the Casa Guidi, where their son was born in 1849. Elizabeth's tyrannical father never forgave her. The couple lived happily in Italy for fifteen years, until her death in Florence in 1861.
The late recognition
His collection Men and Women (1855), with dramatic monologues such as Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, found few readers at first. After Elizabeth's death Browning returned to London, and Dramatis Personae (1864) and The Ring and the Book (1868–69), a long poem about a murder trial in seventeenth-century Rome, finally made him famous.
In his last years he was a celebrated figure, and Browning Societies were founded to study his work. He died in Venice in 1889, at his son's palazzo, on the day his last collection was published, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Anecdotes
The Pied Piper
Browning wrote The Pied Piper of Hamelin in 1842 for a sick boy, Willie Macready, son of the actor William Macready, who wanted a poem he could illustrate. The poem became one of the most popular children's poems in English.
Eloping from Wimpole Street
Elizabeth Barrett left her father's house in secret on 19 September 1846, accompanied by her maid and her spaniel Flush, to join Browning, whom she had married a week earlier. Her father disinherited her and returned all her letters unopened.
Frequently asked questions
What is a dramatic monologue?
A poem spoken by a single character, usually to a silent listener, which reveals the speaker's personality and situation, often unintentionally. Browning's My Last Duchess is the classic example.
What are Robert Browning's main works?
Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864), The Ring and the Book (1868–69) and poems such as My Last Duchess and The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Who was Robert Browning's wife?
The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, author of Sonnets from the Portuguese, whom he married in 1846.