An introduction to Browning’s life and work
Robert Browning () is, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the most famous and widely studied poet of the Victorian era. Yet for the first two decades that he was writing, he was virtually ignored by the public. In this post we offer a very short biography of Browning, a brief introduction to his life and work, touching upon the most curious and interesting aspects.
Robert Browning was born in London in Aged 14, he wrote a poem, ‘The Dance of Death’, in which Ague, Consumption, Fever, Madness, and Pestilence compete for the title of man’s worst foe; this early poem features many of the macabre hallmarks of his later poetry, dealing with death, murder, and ugliness (physical and moral) as it so often does. Although he studied at the University of London he was as much self-taught as formally educated; he dropped out of his studies after a year. His early work included a long narrative poem called Sordello (), which Ezra Pound namechecks at the beginning of The Cantos. Pound may have revered it nearly a century later, but to most Victorians Sordello proved impenetrable. Thomas Carlyle’s wife Jane read the entire thing – nearly 6,
10 Robert Browning
Dr Chhaya Jain
0 Learning Outcomes
1 Introduction
2 Tennyson and Browning–A comparison
3 Robert Browning: A Biographical sketch
4 Browning’s contribution
5 Characteristics of Browning’s Poetry
6 Browning’s limitations
7 My Last Duchess
A critique
Excerpts
Development of thought
8. Fra Lippo Lippi
A critique
Excerpts
Development of thought
9. The Bishop Orders His Tomb At Saint Praxed’s Church
A critique
Excerpts
Development of thought
10 Caliban upon Setebos
A critique
Excerpts
Development of thought
11 Self-assessment: Multiple Choice Questions
12 Self-assessment: Long Answer questions.
13 Know More: Bibliography for Further Reading
Learning Outcomes
The reader will go through the content on Robert Browning and his four poems. A general introduction will help him in knowing about the dramatic monologue and obscurity. As the reader goes through the content, he will come to know about Browning and his attitude towards society.
Exercises in the form of MCQs and long answer questions
Biography
The son of Robert Browning, a Bank of England clerk, and Sarah Anna Wiedemann, of Scottish-German descent, Browning received little formal education. His learning was gleaned mainly from his Father's library at home in Camberwell, South London, where he learnt something, with his Father's help, of Latin and Greek and also read Shelly, Byron and Keats. Though he attended lectures at the University of London in , Browning left after only one session.
Apart from a visit to St Petersburg in and two visits to Italy in and , Browning lived with his parents in London until his marriage of It was during this period that most of the plays and the earlier poems were written and, excepting Strafford, published at his family's expense.
After the secretly held marriage to Elizabeth Barrett in , Browning and wife travelled to Italy where they were, apart from brief holidays in France and England, to spend most of their married life together. In the couple had a son, Robert 'Pen' Browning, and it was Elizabeth who, during this time, was most productive. After her death in , Browning returned to England with his son, where he achieved popular acclaim for his Dramatis Personae and T
Robert Browning was born on May 7, , in Camberwell, which is now a part of London. He had no real formal education so he was largely self educated. His father was a smart man with an extensive library. His mother was kindly, religious minded woman, who loved music and her brilliant son. He lived at his parents house almost until the time of his marriage. He attended a boarding school near Camberwell and spent a little bit of his time traveling to places like Russia and Italy.
But he preferred to have his education at home, where he was tutored in foreign languages, oxing, music, and horsemanship, and where he read “omnivorously. At the age of 14 he first discovered Percy Shelly works and was strongly influenced by it. After reading Shelly, He made the decision to be an atheist and a liberal. But in a few years he grew away from atheism and the extreme phases of his liberalism. The things he learned from the books he read would largely influence his poems later in his life. His earlier poetry was regarded with indifference and largely misunderstood. It was not until the ’s that he would at last gain publicity and would even be compared with Alfred Lord Tennyson, another very a
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