The Making of a Poet, the Making of a Poem: Aurora Leigh and The Ring and the Book

Abstract

46 Victorians Journal The Making of a Poet, the Making of a Poem: Aurora Leighand The Ring and the Book by Alan Barr Aurora Leigh (1856) and The Ring and the Book (1868-69) are the acknowledged masterpieces of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Both epic-length poems are pervasively concerned with art and the making of poetry. Husband and wife worked together, influencing and critiquing each other’s writings, and yet the striking observation that these two monuments of Victorian literature can usefully be understood as complementing each other remains unarticulated and unelaborated. While the earlier poem celebrates the evolution of a female poet, the later relishes a mature poet’s fashioning ofpoetry. The Ring and the Book has long been recognized as a major nineteenthcentury poem, attracting repeated critical attention—including four substantial studies: by Altick and Loucks (1968), Mary Rose Sullivan (1969), William Buckler (1985), and Ann Brady (1988). These monographs and numerous scholarly articles explore the poem’s principal images, its narrative structure and prosody, its characterizations, how it portrays social attitudes—including those concerning religion and gender and the possibility ofascertaining truth—and, centrally, the act ofcreating art. Though New Criticism tended to ignore Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry, “feminist criticism—in its many historical iterations—ensured that her writing found its proper place in the literary canon” (Mullen 63). In the reconstituted Journal of Browning Studies, Simon Avery reports the positive shift in critical responses to EBB, now regarded a person of “increasing self-agency, experimentation and technical skill ... often bold and challenging and clearly committed to poetry as serious socio-political work” (7). Alison Chapman, reviewing The Complete Works ofElizabeth Barrett Browning (2011), declared it “a triumph: a heroic, feminist enterprise that finally gives us the edition EBB deserves .... [W]e now have a revolutionary new EBB,” worldly, outspokenly involved in contemporary social, cultural, and political issues, a scholarly humanist (607). This splendid edition, along with the ongoing publication of her letters, reveals “a new EBB embedded within her complex intellectual, literary, and cultural networks: provocative, politicized, experimental, and modem” (610). Critics are responsive to the altered estimation of her poetry, particularly new scholarship on Aurora Leigh emphasizing its social and gender issues, the evolution of Aurora as a poet, and its conscious participation in a strong literary tradition. While the greater public delighted in the Perseus and Andromeda tale re­ enacted in the Brownings’ elopement, the literary world focused on their artistic cooperation and contributions to each other’s artistry. None of the discussions, however, recognizes the complementarity of the poets’ major poems, that they can be seen as depicting stages that follow, one from Victorians Journal 47 the other. Even the two articles that treat them together ignore that complementarity: James McNally identifies echoes from Aurora Leigh in The Ring and the Book and notes the awareness each had ofthe other’s craft specifically, but he makes no mention of their common interest in poet and craft in the abstract. George Ridenour comments that the two long poems occupy a similar, distinguished place in the corpus of each poet but not that they depict sequential processes: specifically, the making ofa poet anda poet’s transmuting of“fact” into art, both complementary aspects ofthe creative process. Nina Auerbach’s review of critical debates about the Brownings’ collaborative relation notes that “Nobody ... has yet looked closely at the poetry that resulted from this marriage of poets” (162). She concentrates on the psychological tussle between them—Elizabeth, who would express herself in an unconcealed if inconsistent voice and Robert, who typically dramatized personae—but she does not tum to the subject matter common to their epic-length poems. More recently, Mary Pollock detennined: “Quite simply, Aurora Leigh could not have been written without Robert Browning. The generative power of Browning’s presence in Elizabeth Barrett’s life can be felt throughout the courtship correspondence, in which Aurora Leigh began to take shape” (175). Kennedy and Hair, in The Dramatic Imagination ofRobert Browning, offer a telling correction to such estimations. Their chapter, “A Worthy Fellow Poet,” describes the intense, fruitful literary relationship that existed between Elizabeth and Robert before they were married and even...