Reading Browning Intertextually: “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Abstract

This essay is a close reading of Browning's crucial mid-career poem A Toccata of Galuppi's. It identifies and explores the intertextual relationship between “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” affirming the latter as the crucial inter-text for the former. “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” is revealed as a metatextual commentary, providing an interesting midnineteenth-century perspective on Keats’s ode, where we can see aspects of the tension in Browning’s sensibility between “Hebrew” and “Hellene” being played out.