Browning's Experiments with Genre

Abstract

his article on Ironic Pattern of Browning's F. E. L. Priestley observes that of the main aspects of the technical revolution accompanying the development of Romanticism is a highly experimental approach to genre.' As Priestley's student, Hair expands this suggestion into a study of Browning's technical development between Pauline and The Ring and the Book. Since much of Browning's career was dedicated to beating down old generic barriers and building the forms of modern poetry, Hair's subject is clearly crucial and one which Browning critics, absorbed in character, rhetoric, and theme, all too often neglect. But it is also a difficult subject, requiring precision in defining elusive abstractions, intimacy with the history of poetic forms, and sensitivity to the structural principles of specific texts. It is more disappointing than surprising, then, that Hair's book does not live up to the promise of its title. The book focuses on how Browning combined and changed lyric, drama, and narrative in his successive attempts to delineate incidents in the development of a soul and to function as a Marker-see for his readers. Hair proceeds chronologically, treating Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello as experiments in lyric, drama, and narrative, respectively. He argues that in each of these early poems Browning tried to tailor the traditional genre to accommodate his perennial fascination with the intricacies of the human psyche. Paracelsus, for instance, the expected external action, characterization, and plot give way to dialogue which charts the rise and progress of a mood. these early poems, Browning also explored the relationship between poet and reader and grew gradually to believe that the poet must not announce an insight but rather stimulate the reader's cooperating fancy to assemble the insight for himself. Sordello provided the forum in which Browning expounded this theory of the poet as Maker-see, aired his ideas about the various poetic genres, and admitted his predilection for incidents in the development of a soul. Predictably, Hair's analysis of Sordello, which suggested the key terms of this study, proves more cogent and more clearly germane to the book's thesis than his other interpretations of the early verse. Through many of these pages on the early poems, Hair relies on a particular critical method which he articulates in his preface: In my investigation of the literary kinds and modes with which Browning worked I have emphasized the literary relations of his poems-the kind of relations that become evident when the literature of the nineteenth century as a whole is surveyed from the perspective of the following century. Among other literary relations, Hair introduces Henry Taylor's Philip Van Artevelde, published fourteen months before Paracelsus, as a more conventional poetic drama than Browning's. Similarly, Pauline is compared