Robert Browning’s Debut: Ambition Expressed, Ambition Denied

Abstract

When Robert Browning published Pauline in 1833, he both made--and avoided making--his poetic debut. The poem was launched into the literary world in slender volume, between drab paper-covered boards, with simple title: Pauline; Fragment of Confession. The poet's name is notably absent from the title page. Anonymous publication was, of course, common in the early nineteenth century for first volumes of verse. Most famously, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798) appeared without authorial signature, and other nineteenth-century poets used pseudonyms or generic names as they launched their careers: lady for Felicia Hemans's The Restoration of the Works of Art Italy (1816); two brothers for the adolescent Poems (1829) of Alfred, Frederick, and Charles Tennyson; and A for Matthew Arnold's The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849). In publishing Pauline anonymously, though, Browning was not just modestly following convention, but allowing himself the possibility of making, revoking, and multiplying poetic debuts. As he acknowledged W. J. Fox, when asking for review in the Westminster, by keeping authorship of Pauline secret, he kept a loophole ... for backing out of the thing if necessary. (1) Browning's anonymity registers both anxiety and ambition at the start of literary career. This essay will emphasize ambition, especially as expressed in the paratexts of Pauline--those fringe[s] of the printed text which in reality control one's whole reading of the text, as Gerard Genette explains in seminal Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Paratexts work to put high value on the text without antagonizing the reader by too immodestly, or simply too obviously, putting high value on the text's author. (2) Browning, like other young authors, used the paratexts of Pauline signal its value and subtly raise the as-yet-unknown poet's status. In lieu of authorial signature, another poet's name appears on the title page: Clement the early Renaissance poet whose lines supply its epigraph: Plus ne suis ce que j'ai ete, Et ne le scaurois jamais etre. (3) [What once I was I am no more, And nevermore shall find it. (4)] Marot's name, I will argue, substitutes for Browning's and signals the reach of ambition, offering model from literary history express what Browning hoped achieve. The other names that appear in the paratexts-Cornelius Agrippa, Pauline, and the volume's publisher, Saunders and Otley--represent checks on that ambition. Browning builds into the poem, by means of text and paratexts, pendulum of self-assertion and self-denial, pattern of claiming large and fearing the results. Over all of these names but one Browning exercised control--that is, he chose quote Marot and Agrippa and call addressee 'Pauline,' but he had little control over the publisher's name. Although he may not have realized it in 1833, he soon learned that this name was more important than he had anticipated and perhaps represented the strongest check on ambition. Pauline's paratexts--its epigraph from Marot, its Latin preface from Cornelius Agrippa, its interruptive French commentary by Pauline, its closing signature, and its bibliographic code--provide frames through which read Browning's early career. They signal, I believe, poet less guilty about Shelleyan defection or overwhelmed by predecessor's achievement, than someone ambitious inaugurate modern renaissance in poetic art. Ambition Expressed: The Epigraph from Marot Browning scholars have long read Pauline as psychological account of Browning's devotion Shelleyan ideology, falling away from its high ideals, attempt restore himself with the help of Pauline's love, and hope that he might regain place as priest and prophet as of old (l. 1019). (5) For Harold Bloom, Shelley is the spirit of imaginative reproach in Pauline; for Michael Yetman, only with Sordello (1840) does Browning manage a radical shift away from earlier conceptions of poetry and an achievement of his own identity as poet. …