The Approach to the Subject

Abstract

When Browning, speaking to Ruskin, insisted that he could not begin writing poetry until his imaginary reader had ‘conceded licenses to me which you demur at altogether’,1 he was pointing to a problem which he faced throughout his writing career — that of a public expecting something from his poetry which he refused to give, and through this expectation, being blind to that which was peculiarly his own to give. Through his introductions and through pointed remarks in the texts, Browning attempted to warn his reader to expect the unusual, or at least to approach his work with as few prejudices as possible. ‘I am anxious’, he said in introducing Paracelsus, ‘that the reader should not, at the very outset — mistaking my performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common — judge it by principles on which it was never moulded, and subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform.’