Browning's Poetry: Fifty Years After

Abstract

Though it is now fifty years since the death of Robert Browning, the time is yet unripe (or a definitive estimate of his place amongst English men of letters. During his lifetime he experienced, perhaps to a greater extent than any of hi s contemporaries; the vicissitudes of a poet's lot. A long period of depreciation, in which his poetry was a by-word for difficulty' and obscurity, was followed by a sudden access of fame. From the time of the publication of The Ring and the Book in 1868-9 until his death in 1889, his niche beside Tennyson as one of the two master poets of the Victorian era was secure. Criticism was succeeded by panegyric, reaching its acme in the adulation of the Browning Society and its mushroom offshoots in England and America.