Selected Poems pdf Robert Browning Free Download

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, in south-east London, in 1812. The major influences on his early development came from his father’s large and eccentric library, his mother’s deep Nonconformist piety, and his adolescent encounter with Romantic poetry (especially Shelley). After education at local schools and at home, he enrolled at the newly founded University of London in 1828, but left the following year. He travelled widely on the Continent in the 1830s and 1840s. He published Pauline anonymously and without success in 1833; Paracelsus (1835) made him known to London literary society. However, Sordello (1840), derided for its obscurity, blighted his career for over twenty years. He published a series of plays and collections of shorter poems, Bells and Pomegranates (1841–6). In January 1845 he began corresponding with Elizabeth Barrett; he met her in May 1845, and they were married in September 1846 after a clandestine courtship (because of Mr Barrett’s implacable opposition to the idea of any of his children marrying). The Brownings lived in Italy until Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861. Browning published Men and Women (1855), which contains some of his finest poems, but still did not restore his reputation (or his sales). After his wife’s death, Browning returned to England with their only son, and settled in London. He published Dramatis Personae (1864), a collection which began to repair his critical fortunes; this process was accomplished by the appearance of The Ring and the Book (1868–9). Among the works of his later years, Fifine at the Fair (1872), Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), La Saisiaz (1878), Dramatic Idyls (1879), Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887) and Asolando (1889) are outstanding. Browning died in Venice on 12 December 1889, and was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Daniel Karlin is Professor of English Literature at University College London. He has published extensively on Browning (both editions and critical books) and has edited The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse for Penguin Classics. He has also edited Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books for Penguin.

Introduction

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, in south-east London, on 7 May 1812. He was the son of Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, a mild, diffident man who was also an ardent book-lover and collector, and Sarah Anna Wiedemann, a woman of stronger character than her husband, and whose fervent Nonconformist piety was one of the abiding influences on her son’s development. What we know of Browning in his early years suggests intellectual precocity, an excess of nervous energy (he is recorded as gnawing the edge of his pew during a long sermon) and a passionate attachment to home. He was not to leave until his marriage at the age of thirty-four, and remained until then financially dependent on his father, who paid for the publication of his poems. He was educated at home, mainly through the resources of his father’s vast library. As a dissenter Browning could not go to Oxford or Cambridge; in 1828 he enrolled in London’s new University College, but after a year became its most distinguished drop-out. He consistently refused to take up a career, and, overcoming his parents’ opposition, formally dedicated himself to becoming a poet. As a young man he travelled extensively: in 1834 to Russia with a British diplomatic mission, in 1838 to Italy, returning through Germany and the Low Countries, in 1844, to Italy again. His literary career began in 1833 with the publication of Pauline, an anonymous poem which sank without trace and left Browning so ashamed of having written it that he suppressed it for over thirty years until the threat of piracy forced him to acknowledge it. Then came critical success with the appearance of Paracelsus, a long poem ostensibly about the sixteenth-century physician and alchemist, but in reality about the splendours and miseries of (Browning’s) genius. Paracelsus established Browning on the London literary scene (friendships followed with John Forster, Harriet Martineau, Carlyle, Landor, Dickens) and brought him to the attention of the actor-manager William Charles Macready, at whose prompting he wrote his first play, Strafford, produced at Covent Garden in 1837. It did not flop, and Browning was encouraged to try again. He wrote eight plays in all, of which only Pippa Passes (1841) and A Soul’s Tragedy (1846) are other than mediocre. A disastrous production of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (1843), during which Browning broke with Macready, and the subsequent failure of his negotiations with Macready’s great rival, Charles Kean, put an end to Browning’s theatrical ambitions. In the meantime a failure of a longer-lasting kind had afflicted his career with the publication of Sordello in 1840. This great poem, one of the most daring experiments with narrative structure since Paradise Lost, and the most radical (in politics and aesthetics) since Prometheus Unbound, was received with universal derision for its sublime difficulties of form and language.

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Selected Poems Read Online

Robert Browning

SELECTED POEMS

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Daniel Karlin

Contents

ROBERT BROWNING: SELECTED POEMS

Introduction

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