Tennyson said that there were only two lines in it that he understood, the first – ‘Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told’ – and the last – ‘Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told’ – and that both were lies. Carlyle claimed that his wife had read through the poem without being able to discover whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. Browning’s reputation was not to recover for a quarter of a century; the publication of two collections of shorter poems, Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), which between them contain some of his finest poems in the genre he was to make his own, the dramatic monologue, raised barely a whisper of recognition. Frustration with London literary life was at its height when he began his correspondence with the reclusive invalid, Elizabeth Barrett, prompted by a complimentary allusion to him in one of her recently published Poems (1844). She, six years older than he, had given herself up for lost in human and social terms; whatever the exaggerations and distortions of the legend, there is no doubt that Browning did, as she said, ‘lift me from the ground and carry me into life and the sunshine’. In September 1846, after a clandestine courtship in the shadow of Elizabeth Barrett’s domineering and disagreeable (rather than monstrous) father, they married and left England for Italy. There, first at Pisa and then at Florence, and with occasional trips to France and England, they remained until Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861. Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (‘Pen’) was born in 1849. Italy was congenial to Browning’s poetry; he was not spared the rebuke of English critics (among them Charles Kingsley) for his unpatriotic liking for the landscapes and characters of ‘abroad’ (so different from the home life of their own dear Tennyson). Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850), a pair of poems on religious subjects, is of interest to Browning specialists; of interest to everyone is Men and Women (1855), the collection generally held to be his masterpiece. I would personally prefer the claim of his next volume, Dramatis Personae (1864), the first to be published after his wife’s death, but there is no doubt that together, and with the addition of The Ring and the Book (1868–9), they make up the core of Browning’s enduring presence in the canon of English poetry. The Ring and the Book, twenty-one thousand lines long, consists of a series of interlocking dramatic monologues all telling the same story, that of an obscure seventeenth-century cause célèbre, the murder by Count Guido Franceschini of his wife, Pompilia, and his subsequent trial and execution. The element of sensation and melodrama is mixed with social satire, religious and philosophical meditation, and acute psychological probing: the whole represents Browning’s heroic attempt to fuse Milton with Dickens, the modern novel with the epic poem. The Ring and the Book also marked the decisive advent of critical and popular acclaim: living in London, Browning re-entered the literary and social scene from which he had been an exile; he was lionized, and eventually canonized with the formation of the Browning Society in 1881. (His attitude to the Society was one of guarded appreciation.) A long overdue reassessment of his writings after The Ring and the Book has taken place in recent years, though it must be accepted that, because of the established fame of the earlier works and the fact that many of the later ones are lengthy and recondite, they are unlikely to achieve the same standing in the tradition. Among the finest of the later works are Fifine at the Fair (1872), whose central character is Don Juan; Aristophanes’ Apology (1875); La Saisiaz (1878), a philosophical elegy; the two volumes of Dramatic Idyls (1879, 1880; the spelling was chosen to differentiate them from Tennyson’s ‘English Idylls’ and Idylls of the King); Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887), an oblique intellectual autobiography; and his last volume, Asolando, published on the day of his death. Browning died in Venice on 12 December 1889. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. ‘A good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey,’ wrote Henry James, ‘but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd.’

In the same piece (‘Browning in Westminster Abbey’, later included in English Hours) James gave the best summary critical judgement of Browning when he called him ‘a tremendous and incomparable modern’. James, of course, meant by ‘modern’ what we now call ‘Victorian’; but the ‘all-touching, all-trying spirit of his work, permeated with accumulations and playing with knowledge’ connects Browning as much with our century as with his own. It is as a contemporary that Browning strikes us, not as the funereal grammarian of a past culture. I do not deny that Browning is a poet of his period, but I do deny that he is a period poet. The author of the lines ‘God’s in his heaven / All’s right with the world’ has been praised and blamed for being a breezy Victorian optimist, even though the lines are spoken by a young girl outside a house where an adulterous couple are quarrelling over the recent murder of the lady’s husband. Such misconceptions haunt Browning’s work – ironically perhaps, for he was a poet of misconceptions (the title of one of his poems), of failures, of abortive lives and loves, of the just-missed and the nearly fulfilled: a poet, in other words, of desire, perhaps the greatest in our language. The rapid colloquial energy of his style, his gift for the memorable phrase (especially in the vivid openings of poems: ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us’, ‘It was roses, roses, all the way’, ‘Stop! Let me have the truth of that’), are not the concomitants of uplift and robust optimism: the three poems I have just cited are all about disillusion and disenchantment. The experience of reading Browning’s poems is far from depressing, yet fall and loss are closely woven into their design. They witness to a double vision, famously put in the closing lines of ‘Two in the Campagna’: ‘The old trick! Only I discern / Infinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn.’ The poems dramatize the recognition that fulfilment lies beyond reach (as in Fra Lippo Lippi’s anticipation that the painters who succeed him will also succeed where he has failed), but this aftermath is never represented, only gestured towards, and sometimes not even then: ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ is absolutely stopped by the indecipherable enigma of its last line, which repeats the title and, disallowing the question ‘what happened next’, throws the poem back on itself.

Desire, then, is the keynote of Browning’s poetry, its ruling spirit, that which rescues it from Matthew Arnold’s charge of ‘confused multitudinousness’. Yet the impression of multitudinousness is undeniably there, seized in this early tribute from Walter Savage Landor:

     Since Chaucer was alive and hale,

No man hath walked along our road with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.

          (‘To Robert Browning’, 1845)

The varied discourse of Browning’s poetry is perhaps its most immediate attraction; the title of Men and Women, as democratic in its way as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (published the same year), opens the gates of poetry to the common people and to everyday things. High and low rub shoulders; the landscape is as likely to be suburban as sublime; Browning’s kingdom, like the kingdom of heaven, is a homely as well as a glorious place. In part we can see here the influence of both drama (especially Shakespeare) and the contemporary novel on Browning’s conception of poetry; but it is also a matter of temperament, of native wit. Writing to Elizabeth Barrett in 1845, Browning expressed his dislike of Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, and in doing so revealed the focus and bent of his own imagination:

And then that way, when she and the like of her are put in a new place, with new flowers, new stones, faces, walls, all new – of looking wisely up at the sun, clouds, evening star, or mountain top and wisely saying ‘who shall describe that sight!’ – Not you, we very well see – but why dont you tell us that at Rome they eat roasted chestnuts, and put the shells into their aprons, the women do, and calmly empty the whole on the heads of the passengers in the street below; and that at Padua when a man drives his waggon up to a house and stops, all the mouse-coloured oxen that pull it from a beam against their foreheads sit down in a heap and rest … Her remarks on art … are amazing. Fra Angelico, for instance, only painted Martyrs, Virgins &c – she had no eyes for the divine bon-bourgeoisie of his pictures; the dear common folk of his crowds, those who sit and listen (spectacle at nose and bent into a comfortable heap to hear better) at the sermon of the Saint – and the children, and women, – divinely pure they all are, but fresh from the streets & market place …

Sun, clouds, evening star, mountain top: these are the traditional props of Romantic lyric, beloved of Browning’s early idol, Shelley, now rejected in the prose of Shelley’s widow – rejected in favour of the ‘streets & market place’, closely observed and concretely rendered. The passage brings us close to the aesthetic of ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, but it would be a mistake to assume that Browning is advocating, or practised himself, a naïve, literal-minded realism.