Browning's Poems Research Articles

Browning’s Poetics of Necropolitical Power Dynamics

This article explores the life-scaring power dynamics in Browning’s poetry regarding the social praxis of gender as staged by Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess.” To this end, it peruses these poems to show the poetic necropolitics; politics of death. Delving into the poems, the male chauvinist narrators hold the bodies of their female counterparts before annihilating them. Taking stock of necropolitical power wielded by the sovereign narrators, this paper aims to parse the deadening lives of the perpetrated Duchess and Porphyria. For this purpose, it deploys Achille Mbembe’s understanding of necropolitics as a critical insight that he imbibes from Michel Foucault’s biopolitical racism (that holds the authority to deploy alterity and expose life to death). Meanwhile, the study does not only expand the necropolitical literary explication of Browning's poems, nonetheless, it attempts to reorient the readers to reexamine the alibi of the killers in the poems. Enthused by Mbembe’s acumen that revisits how power makes its subjects docile through political decisionism: “who must live and who must die,” this paper debates the sexist discourse of the killer-narrators and the living-dead ladies before their killing. Largely, it wonders to know how the subjects turn out to be the living dead or the object of male sadism. To elucidate this life-scaring politics; necropolitics, this paper also probes the presence (hegemonic existence) of sexist males that renders the female absent (non-existence) before they are immolated in the poems. It concludes that sexist patriarchy replicating the sovereign power constitutes the precarious life of the females via making them abject and invisible through ‘corpsing-policy’ which becomes a pertinent issue to rear humanism in Humanity Studies.

Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove

Reviewed by: Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture by Patricia Cove Diana Moore (bio) Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove; pp. x + 190. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $105.00, $24.95 paper, $27.94 ebook Patricia Cove's Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture forms an admirable addition to the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series and skillfully fulfills the series' mission of re-evaluating Victorian literature, culture, history, and identity through close readings. In many ways, Cove's work treads a well-established path. Countless British authors wrote about Italy during the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian independence and unification. An equal, if not greater, number of scholars have subsequently shown how these authors fashioned and refashioned their selfunderstanding through their relationship with and depictions of Italy. Cove provides a fresh take on this British obsession with Italy, however, by moving away from the most widely celebrated and studied authors, like Lord Byron, in favor of lesser-known and more marginal figures, such as Italian patriot and exile Giovanni Ruffini. Cove claims that the voices of these "outsiders and figures of cultural hybridity—women, expatriates, exiles, Anglo-Italians and Anglo-Irish"—reveal more about the contradictory and varied British responses to the Italian Risorgimento and related ongoing debates about "selfdetermination, citizenship and political rights" (23). The book is comprised of a general introduction, four case study chapters, and a brief conclusion. The chapters chronologically trace "four concrete, political focal points of British engagement with the Risorgimento" from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the creation in 1861 of the Kingdom of Italy, and they show how throughout this period British authors increased their engagement with the Italian present rather than its idealized past (21). Chapter 1 examines Lady Morgan's travelogue Italy (1821) and Mary Shelley's historical novel Valperga (1823). Cove argues that, unlike many of their fellow Romantic authors, who wrote about an abstract version of Italy and only cared about how Italian affairs impacted British politics, Morgan and Shelley were attentive to the specific historical and political realities of the Italian peninsula. Moreover, she claims, their status as outsiders made them more sensitive to issues of power and appreciative of Italy's resistance to the dominant post-1815 empires. [End Page 495] Chapters 2 and 3 move forward into the Victorian period, tracing the rise of leftwing Mazzinian politics, its eventual disappointment in the failed revolutions of 1848-9, and subsequent decline. In chapter 2, Cove focuses on two of Ruffini's English-language novels, Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and Doctor Antonio (1855), and reveals how Ruffini subverted the common trope of Italy as a place of exile, estrangement, and disorientation for British travelers by centering the sufferings of dispossessed Italian patriots instead. Chapter 3 then analyzes Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859-60) in relation to both the 1844 Post Office Espionage Scandal and the emergence of the sensation novel. Cove demonstrates how the British public's discovery that their government had been opening Mazzini's mail and sending its contents to continental authorities prompted a crisis of mid-Victorian liberalism and uncovered hidden continental-style despotism underneath the façade of British freedom and modernity. In a parallel fashion, she claims, sensation novels like The Woman in White brought the themes of the gothic novel home from historic settings and foreign shores to the contemporary British domestic sphere. The final chapter looks at the trauma surrounding the 1859 Second War of Independence through an examination of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Cove shows how Barrett Browning, who was supportive of the Risorgimento, also acknowledged the costs of unification and "the silences and erasures imposed through violent, historical change" (126). Finally, in the conclusion Cove offers a brief glimpse at the period after 1870, when the Italian state reclaimed control over the city of Rome, through the writings of authors like Henry James, Vernon Lee, and George Meredith; these works "demonstrate the extent to which politics infiltrated post-Risorgimento, aestheticised Italy" (164). Overall, this volume reveals the benefits of studying nationalist movements...

Robert Browning

Robert Browning Suzanne Bailey (bio) Philip Kelly, Edward Hagan, and Linda M. Lewis's new volume 28 of The Brownings' Correspondence has been several years in the making and offers one of the more intriguing glimpses into the Brownings' lives. We hear more of Robert Browning's voice in the surviving letters from this period and can follow some of the epistolary conversations on the illness and death from cancer of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sister Henrietta. This year is also significant in marking the publication of volumes 5 and 6 of The Poems of Browning, edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin, and Joseph Phelan and focused entirely on Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868–1869). Among themes in books and articles this year, there is an interest in exploring historical events or encounters that may have been woven into Browning's poems and that may shed some light on his creative process. Claire Simmons examines Victorian records of the lunar rainbow and Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850); Joseph Phelan connects Browning's friendship with Lady William Russell to the mysterious portrait in "A Likeness" (1864). Browning's influence on other artists is evident in a striking number of publications, including Patricia Rigg's book on the Victorian poet Mary Robinson, an essay on Richard Henry Wilde, and critical work on more contemporary poets such as Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Paul Muldoon. The Victorianist and poet Jason Camlot writes a monologue in the style of Browning in a recent poetry collection, while Jane Manning uncovers allusions to Browning's life in a Gary Carpenter composition for mezzo-soprano. In addition to historical allusions and poetic intertexts, essays this year touch on Browning and nineteenth-century literary currents and on themes of labor and money. [End Page 356] ________ The Brownings' Correspondence, volume 28, May 1860–February 1861 (Winfield, Kan.: Wedgestone, 2022) Volume 28 of the Correspondence contains a more extensive collection of letters from Browning than in past volumes, such that one can follow how he deals with challenges such as his ongoing stewardship of Walter Savage Landor and his affairs, as well as the progress of his sister-in-law's illness and Browning's managing of the impact on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had suffered health setbacks. The letters are written in the context of the aftermath of the Treaty of Turin in March 1860, by which the Duchy of Savoy and the County of Nice were ceded to France. Barrett Browning is pained by the loss of Savoy and records Browning's comment on Napoleon III: "It was a great action; but he has taken eighteen pence for it, which is a pity" (p. 3). During the period covered in the volume, the Brownings leave Rome in May for several months in Siena, returning to Florence in October 1860 and to Rome in November. Letters include Browning's correspondence with Walter Savage Landor, who sends Browning his thoughts on Shakespeare, in addition to other literary commentary. Barrett Browning also shares the interesting news that Browning "has been writing a good deal this winter," "working at a long poem which I have not seen a line of, and producing short lyrics which I have seen, & may declare most worthy of him" (p. 10). Barrett Browning's remarks suggest a renewal in Browning's writing of poetry, and she also suggests something of her poetic relationship with him in the remarks that follow: "For me if I have attained anything of force & freedom by living near . . . the oak, < . . . > the better for me—But I hope you don't think I mimic < him, or > lose my individuality" (p. 10). She repeats the news with slightly more detail to William Allingham, suggesting that Browning's activity has extended through the winter of 1859–1860: "Robert is writing, not political poems, but a poem in books, a line of which I have not seen—and also certain exquisite lyrics . . . Neither he nor I have been idle this winter, nor mean to be idle this summer—" (p. 16). William Allingham replies with interest that "the news of Mr. Browning's growing Poem is of the best one...

"The Mournful Echo": Intimacy in American Recitations and Periodical Reprinting of "Mother and Poet," 1861–1879

"The Mournful Echo":Intimacy in American Recitations and Periodical Reprinting of "Mother and Poet," 1861–1879 Elizabeth Howard (bio) In Book I of Aurora Leigh, the young author Aurora asks of her sources of inspiration, "My own best poets am I one with you/That thus I love you, or but one through love?"1 While Elizabeth Barrett Browning's heroine debates the causes of her affinity for the poetry of others, the intimacy she feels toward them she asserts without qualification.2 While the possibilities for intimacy between poem, poet, and reader are expansive, Aurora's "oneness" describes affinity, proximity, and even exclusivity as features of poetic intimacy. In addition to the reader's or audience's affinity with a particular poet, poems can also foster poetic intimacy outside the textual boundaries of the poem itself, largely by means of the physical spaces and pages in which they appear and reappear. Of the spaces for aural poetry performances in the mid-nineteenth century, the salon curated an intimacy defined by its shared-but-semiprivate setting, its discrete temporality, and the slippage between audience and performers. The periodical likewise fostered a poetic intimacy with its readers, curating textual spaces on the printed page, which mediated the reader's intimacy with the poem as well as with an "imagined community" of readers and editors.3 A case study of poetic media's competing claims to intimacy in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay juxtaposes two media replications of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Mother and Poet" (1861) between 1861 and 1879—the salon recitation and the periodical reprinting—to assess each medium's curation of intimacy in a poetic encounter. My transatlantic analysis of U.S. performances and reprintings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem during and after the American Civil War not only opens comparative contexts for curating poetic intimacy, but it also underscores poetry's capacity to voice mimetic grief across national boundaries in a variety of media. [End Page 165] I begin this essay reviewing recitations of "Mother and Poet," giving comparative attention to performances in salon spaces. Consolidating the popular criteria for evaluation, I compare salon recitations of "Mother and Poet" with reviews of its performance in concert halls, at benefit readings, and school recitations. In a wide range of recitations of "Mother and Poet," the poem's death events are often eclipsed by the audience's interest in the poem's emotional expression, particularly how grief sounds when voiced by a body. "Mother and Poet" generated a particular enthusiasm not only for its performative possibilities in vocalizing pathos, but also for its aural experience since recitations of "Mother and Poet" change the print poem's aural imaginary into an explicitly auditory experience. American reviews of recitations of "Mother and Poet" give their attention almost exclusively to the interaction between the performer's voice, physical presence, and persona in a particular space.4 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem gives its dramatic attention to a grieving mother who describes her plight with italicized first-person pronouns and third-person demonstrative adjectives; if Emilio and Alfredo are absented by their death, their mother is adamantly present in the poem; she is both the emphatic "me" who ends the first stanza (l. 5) and the agonized "This woman, this" of the second stanza (l. 8). In reviews of recitations of "Mother and Poet," however, the particularity of "[t]his woman, this" is tethered to the performer: the audience shares its intimacy in an aural experience with the voice and presence of a particular performer in ways that efface or diminish the presence of the grieving mother in the poem. In its American periodical reprintings, the attention that "Mother and Poet" gives to the grieving speaker—its "This woman, this"—likewise shifts its object away from Barrett Browning's narrator. This time, however, the American periodical reprintings of the 1860s overwhelmingly emphasize the imagined American maternal reader as sharing with the poem's Italian narrator a similar, even an identical crisis of loss. In the periodical the poem is given direct explanatory power to describe the familial costs of the American Civil War over the 1860s and 1870s. The poem is reprinted...

"I'm some kind of anti-Browning": the counterpoint of the English pretext and subtext in the "Poem without a Hero" of A. Akhmatova

The subject of the study is the intertextual dialogue of the "Poem without a Hero" by A. Akhmatova with texts by Robert Browning: the poetic diptych "Porphyria's Lover" and "My last Duchess". The object of the study is the counterpoint of the pretext and subtext of English literature in the multilayered and polysemantic text of the "Poem without a Hero", to which Akhmatova herself attributed the "triple bottom". The authors consider in detail the overlap of the motives of Browning's poems with the text of the "Poem without a Hero" and demonstrate the systemic "mirroring" of the reflection of situations: the complexes of the motives of the Browning diptych in Akhmatova are inverted. Particular attention is paid to the issues of various interpretations of the text of the poem "Porphyria's Lover" and related interpretation options for individual scenes and fragments in the text of the "Poem without a Hero". The main conclusions of the study are the establishment of an unambiguous semantic connection of the "Poem without a hero" with two Browning poems. The research methods include comparative-historical and intertextual. A special contribution of the authors to the study of the topic is the substantiation of the trace of Robert Browning's diptych in the text of "Poems without a Hero": traditionally, another work of Browning is indicated among the sources of the poem. The novelty of the research is determined by the involvement of new material and the proposal of a new reading of Akhmatova's self-identification as "anti-Browning". These words should be deciphered not only by projecting the relationship of the Browning and Barrett pair onto the Gumilev and Akhmatova pair, but also as a reference to the mirror reversal of the situations described by Browning in the dramatic monologues of the diptych.

Voicing an Epic for the Age in The Prelude and Aurora Leigh

Voicing an Epic for the Age in The Prelude and Aurora Leigh Eleanor Reeds (bio) When Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh was published in 1856, its first readers struggled to evaluate the work according to conventional expectations of genre, even as many of them praised its innovative nature. Writing to Robert Browning on 21 November 1856, Bryan Waller Proctor labeled the poem as "something between an epic & an idyll & a ___ I want a something to add to the description" while commending it as able to "induce new things in verse—we have been too much imprisoned by precedents."1 For Robert Bulwer Lytton, however, the uniqueness of the poem did not prevent its participation in a recognizable generic tradition: he declared to its author in December 1856 that Aurora Leigh was "the solitary Epic of this age" (3933). Indeed, the poem's heterogeneity works to assert its epic status for modern critics such as Herbert Tucker, who describes Barrett Browning's combination of "synchronic extension" with narrative progression as characteristic in his study of the genre's development during the nineteenth century.2 Identifying Aurora Leigh as an epic also enables scholars to approach Barrett Browning's poem in the context of William Wordsworth's similar experiment in writing an epic that narrates a contemporary poet's development: The Prelude. This comparative approach takes seriously Barrett Browning's aspiration to be an epic poet, an aspiration that reveals itself in her adaptation of Wordsworth's apostrophic forms of address in The Prelude. In order to participate in such a distinguished generic tradition, both poets had to produce a voice adequate to the task, and they did so by addressing a specific reader whose role all other readers could come to occupy. Focusing on the constitutive role of these individual readers, usually identified as Samuel Taylor Coleridge—albeit a fictionalized version—and Romney Leigh, this essay reveals the parallels between Wordsworth's and Barrett Browning's poetic practice; it also evaluates their divergences, as the lyric device of apostrophe upon which Wordsworth relies is developed by Barrett Browning into a more dialogic mode. While Wordsworth takes advantage of masculine privilege to occupy the role of an epic poet with ease, Barrett Browning depicts Aurora's struggle to exercise the authority of a writer who summons a responsive [End Page 225] reader and her ultimate progress toward not only recognizing but also celebrating the poet's dependence upon the voices of others. By attending to voice, the "I" that may speak to "you," rather than to the formal constraints of the epic as a genre, I show that Wordsworth and Barrett Browning developed a new form of epic for the nineteenth century by reimagining their poetry's temporal relationship to readers in the present and future. In aspiring to be an epic poet, Barrett Browning had to confront deeply gendered beliefs—which persisted despite the success of Aurora Leigh—about the nature of literary production. For instance, a complimentary November 1856 review described how readers of the poem listen both to "the voice of [Barrett Browning's] inner life" and to "the voice of an Isaiah … that voice which speaks like a revelation from heaven, that 'utterance of the gods' which is the attribute of the greatest poets."3 The intimate and personal voice of the woman is distinguished from the voice that asserts Barrett Browning's status as a great poet, a status dependent upon her role as a mere conduit of unearthly powers. Indeed, much to Barrett Browning's amusement, it was apparently rumored in Florence in 1857 that "'Aurora' was written by the 'spirits'" and its author "disavowed any share in it except the mere mechanical holding of the pen-!!!" (3957). In such accounts, the elevated role of a prophet able to commune with the Muses and other divine beings is transformed into the passive role of a spirit medium capable of automatic writing. The former privilege is reserved for male writers alone. More serious discussions of Aurora Leigh in the 1850s still betray such gendered bias toward its author. As Marisa Palacios Knox notes, Victorian critics "could neither avoid defining the aesthetic value of Aurora Leigh...

Love in Robert Browning's Poems

Robert Browning is considered as an optimist, but in his love poems run a torrent of devastation and destruction. Both in his poetry of courtship and poetry of marriage, there are damaging and harrowing love experiences. “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess” are typical examples. Both dramatic personae, motivated by their extreme desire of dominance, murder their beloved ones. Therefore, in Browning’s world of love, the relationships are blighted by loss and disillusion.

“Human Speech is Naught”? The Authoritative Word in Robert Browning's Poetry

ABSTRACTIt has often been argued that Browning's poems, culminating in the form of the dramatic monologue, evince a rejection of the authoritative authorial voice and insist on the elusiveness of objective truth. Indeed, Browning repeatedly presents human speech as inherently flawed, distinct from the religious idea of the efficacious Word and intrinsically inferior to it. However, the Word, in its various senses, is of major importance to Browning's thought and work: he questions it, emulates it and appropriates it, and always in relation to the authority and truth value of poetic language. References to the Word in “An Epistle … of Karshish”, “A Death in the Desert”, The Ring and the Book and “Fust and his Friends” reveal Browning's appropriation of the authoritative Word within poetic language, with the effect of granting his poetry religious authority, juxtaposed with the nineteenth century crisis of biblical authority taking place in the background.

Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards by Jack Zipes

Reviewed by: Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards by Jack Zipes JoAnn Conrad (bio) Jack Zipes. Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Jack Zipes's latest omnibus is a lusciously colorful coffee-table book that (re-) unites fairy-tale themed postcards with their textual inspirations. Seeking to redress the "neglect" (xiv) of such fairy-tale postcards "by collectors, scholars of cultural studies and folklore, and the general public" (xiii), Zipes's stated mission is to examine these "incredibly exotic" (xiii) postcards in order to provide a new "optique" (xx) on fairy tales, forcing us to rethink them through different perspectives. Indeed, the field of fairy-tale studies has been slow to analyze the role of mass-mediated illustrations as semiotic markers, circulating, as do these postcards, disconnected from their tales while tethered to them through their iconization. As a result, illustrations have mostly been treated as complementary and ancillary to the tales themselves, and Zipes's promise of a new integrative analytic approach is as welcome as it is long overdue. Unfortunately, in terms of the material, organization, and analysis, this book fails to deliver on its ambitious goals. The publisher's webpage describes the book as "a pictorial history of fairy-tale postcards throughout the world" ("Tales"), and yet the organization of the material is neither chronological nor historically contextualized. Instead, the organizing principle is the classic European fairy tale, with the images on the postcards receiving slight mention or analysis. Despite the subtitle's promise to "retell" the tales through the postcards, the cards are merely appended to a reiteration of the classic tales. [End Page 387] The book is organized into two lopsided parts: "The Tales" comprising roughly ninety percent of the book, and "The Art" making up the remaining ten percent. The first group introduced, by far the largest, is what Zipes calls "Classical Tales"—Little Red Riding Hood, Little Tom Thumb/Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots, but also incongruously The Pied Piper and Rip Van Winkle, both more appropriately categorized as (local) legends, not fairy tales. For all these "Classic Tales" Zipes also provides full texts, and for the first six he lists the versions from both Charles Perrault and the Grimms, although with no other reference to source material, editions, or translators. Additionally, Zipes includes Robert Browning's poem of the Pied Piper as well as Washington Irving's full story of the supernatural encounter in the Catskills. Taking up a good two-thirds of this large book, the inclusion of such readily available texts begs the question: Why include them again here? The presentation of tales and accompanying illustrated postcards proceeds with a series of shorter sections: "A Mélange of the Brothers Grimm," "Stories by Hans Christian Andersen," "Russian Fairy Tales," and "Fairy-tale Novels." In most of these sections, the accompanying postcards are at most described, and often unremarked upon, as if the images are self-evident and ahistorical, their presence bearing witness to the timeless and transcultural nature of the tales themselves, despite the fact that the majority are from the French and German literary canon. The section on Andersen demands a deeper look in that it represents a missed opportunity to truly investigate the dynamic relationship between published tales and their illustrations. Andersen courted magazine editors and publishers who traded in illustrations, and his stories were the subject of hundreds of different visual interpretations during the "Golden Era" of book illustration. Those images, owned by the publishers, were reprinted in a host of media—cards, postcards, calendars, coloring books, paper dolls, and die-cut trade cards, for example. However, rather than focusing on this intersection of the tales and their industrially produced images and mass distribution, Zipes instead relies on his previous biographical and psychoanalytical analysis of Andersen the man. This inattention to historical context coupled with a set of images that comes almost exclusively from German postcards sets the stage for such pronouncements as: "there are not many fairy-tale postcards of ["The Little Mermaid"], perhaps because Andersen was somewhat of a misogynist" (159). Putting aside the impossibility of extrapolating...

Lyric Tipplers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Wine of Cyprus,” Emily Dickinson’s “I taste a liquor,” and the Transatlantic Anacreontic Tradition

In August 1846, shortly before their marriage, Robert told one work in her 1844 Poems had always affected him profoundly--perhaps ... more profoundly than any other by her, filling his heart with desires. (1) The aroused such unutterable desires--Wine of Cyprus--is read today. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, it was a universally praised minor in the collection made Elizabeth Barrett England's most internationally recognized woman poet. Like EBB's other 1844 works, Wine of Cyprus was included in the successively expanded collections of Poems (1850, 1853, 1856) published under her married name, reproduced in pirated editions in America. These widely reviewed collections made Mrs. Browning's poems ... household words in Massachusetts to every school boy & (yet more) every school girl, Thomas Wentworth Higginson observed to her poet-husband in a letter of January 1854 (BC 20: 53). Although Emily Dickinson did not approach Higginson until 1862 to ask if her verse was alive, his comment to reflects the contexts in which Mrs. Browning became an empowering star on Dickinson's artistic horizon well before the publication of Aurora Leigh in November 1856. For Poets, she had Keats--and Mr and Mrs Browning, as she informed Higginson, and Paula Bennett is far from alone in identifying EBB as Dickinson's Most beloved and chosen precursor among women writers. (2) Studies of this transatlantic poetic relationship typically focus on Dickinson's deep engagement with Aurora Leigh and/or and the American poet's three elegies for that Foreign Lady: especially think I was enchanted, representing the Conversion of the Mind Dickinson experienced in encountering what she termed the Titanic opera of EBB's poetry. (3) Like teeming grapevines, however, the tendrils of affiliation intertwining Dickinson's poetry with EBB's grow in multiple directions. This essay explores unexamined connections between EBB's Wine of Cyprus and Dickinson's taste a liquor brewed (Fr207) in conjunction with the historical and cultural contexts gave rise to these works. As I hope to show, these minor poems speak to the rich diversity of the lyric forms available to the two poets and the similar strategies they developed to transform one particularly masculine literary tradition. Despite very notable differences in form, Dickinson's most famous poem and EBB's exhibit some striking parallels in subject matter, metaphors, and motifs. In Dickinson's euphoric lyric as it appears in fascicle 12, the speaker rhapsodizes about an Alcohol never brewed from Frankfort berries (Vats opon upon the Rhine in the variant), describes herself as Inebriate of air, and finally pictures herself as a little Tippler / From Manzanilla come!--or, in the often preferred variant ending, Leaning against the--Sun-- (Fr207,11. 1-5, 15-16). Wine of Cyprus celebrates a similar state of ecstatic inebriation, in EBB's case resulting from a gift of Cyprian honey from the classical scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd. Thank you my very dear friend!! I write to you drunk with Cyprus! she wrote to Boyd in June 1844- Extolling the ideal nectar as suited to gods or demigods and potent enough to inspire her dog Flush to talk in or English (though denounced as exceedingly beastly by her father), she fancifully conveyed her own particular intoxication (BC 9: 22, 77). In the same letter, she informed Boyd of progress on her 1844 collection: have passed the middle of my second volume--and I only hope the critics may say of the rest it smells of Greek wine (p. 22). Thus, she hinted at her return gift, dedicated to the blind scholar who had studied Greek with her when she was shut out from the male preserve of a university classical education. In Wine of Cyprus, she transforms Boyd's gift of honey into an expansive metaphor for the pleasure she had experienced in drinking deeply from the Greek poetical tradition. …

A Study on Robert Browning's Porphyria's Lover

The research paper based on Browning's startling poem “Porphyria's Lover ”aims to perceive the panorama behind the bars of words. Our work makes an effort to judge the characters, mentioned in the poem, in a different perspective. Many critics criticize the speaker of the poem to be “mad ”but there is always “the other face of a coin ”. We do not justify the gruesome act committed by the speaker (even God was left without justification in the end) but an effort is made to mould the perception in a different angle. It is like one can see deep inside one's entails, the underneath turmoil of emotions is unraveled. Browning is beyond praise and his imagination is beyond liminaliqi.

Browning's The bishop orders his tomb at Saint Praxed's church, 76-79, 98-100

In Robert Browning's poem The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church the dying bishop's main rival in his struggle for the power which he sought to attain as a befitting mode of life had been his predecessor, Gandolf. For this reason he tried to play down the latter's significance when Gandolf died. Although Gandolf had already chosen the best position in the church for his sarcophagus, he had to leave its execution to his successor who, driven by a desire to revenge himself, selected as material a paltry onion-stone and for the epitaph, in keeping with the poor quality of the stone, he drew on the late Latin of Ulpian.

“Tulips on Dunghills”: Regendering the Georgic in Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh

Of the mutual admiration she shares with her brother Edward, referred to as Elizabeth Barrett Browning claims, Our minds our souls are united by the same opinions, the same interests! ... If there be any tie stronger than these, know not of it!; later in the same essay she writes, Let those who have perused together the Roman & Greek Classics, and who have together resisted difficulties of style & language decide whether or not our attachment be founded on folly--! (1) And yet despite her claim to their identical interests and opinion, we learn that their devotion was at the same time in many ways kept alive by a tension founded in their differences. Elizabeth again: I am not content till excel; but Bro is satisfied with mediocrity--! ... My imagination is perhaps exalted & glowing than my dear Bro's but in judgement he infinitely surpasses me! His abilities are more solid & profound, hers more refined & dazzling; she prefers literature Poetry Metaphysics & fanciful philosophy, he, the sober reasoning of the Historian (Correspondence, 1:357). As will suggest, the interplay between these factors--including their differences of character as reflected in her reading of the Classics--serves as touchstone for my reading of Barrett Browning's poem Aurora Leigh, particularly as it is nuanced by her sense of genre and of gender. This convergence of factors is developed in her letter to Hugh Stuart Boyd, one of Barrett Browning's great intellectual companions, where she confesses her failure to appreciate Virgil (I have tried hard to like olives & the Aeneid upon principle--and could succeed on neither point) in contrast to her love of Homer (Critics who think it necessary to compare Virgil & Homer [they may as well compare the with the mountain!) after delivering up the praise of judgement to are graciously pleased to leave the fire with Homer). (2) Virgil is the mouse here, Homer the mountain; Virgil judgement, Homer fire. Virgil's character traits here she attributes to Bro, and likewise Homer's to herself. As such, Bro, reflecting the Roman, is rational, reflective, moderate, and judicious, while she, the Greek, is imaginative, inspired, enthusiastic, and ardent. Elsewhere in her essay, On Ancient and Modern Literature, the contrast is hyperbolized between the plagiarist Virgil, and the sublime conceptions of Homer the father of the lyre. (3) Browning, claim, invokes these distinctions in Aurora Leigh in order for Aurora to cultivate her own aesthetic, drawing from each perspective and regendering both as feminine. so doing, she appropriates Virgil's georgic, infuses it with the ardent enthusiasm of her Homer, and uses it, finally, to critique Romney's Virgil. As such, she challenges masculinist Greek and Roman views of history and offers instead a history inspired by her own vision, one anticipating Kevis Goodman's recently developed sense of modernity in Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism. (4) Echoing the Virgilian georgic themes in her poem, she transforms conventional georgic roots in agricultural labor to include both tending the soil and also tending social ills, human relationships, and words themselves. While still young and living with her English aunt, Aurora the aspiring poet famously decides to crown herself with some headlong ivy, rationalizing that she may In sport, not pride ... learn the feel of it, / Before my brows be numb as Dante's own. (5) She is interrupted by her cousin Romney who reminds her that women Scarce need be poets, and warns her to Keep to the green wreath, / Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze / Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles / The clean white morning dresses (2.93, 93-96). Her response: I perceive / The headache is too noble for my sex. / You think the heartache would sound decenter, / Since that's the woman's special, proper ache (2. …

“Between Politics and Deer-Stalking”: Browning’s Periodical Poetry

Robert Browning's best-known comment about publishing poetry in periodicals registers his contempt for it. Contemplating how present the completed Ring and the Book Victorian audiences, he consulted William Allingham: And now! can you advise me? I'm puzzled about how publish it. I want people not turn the end, but read through in proper order. Magazine, you'll say: but no, I don't like the notion of being Politics and Deer-Stalking, say. Given Browning's prodigious memory and ambivalence toward Allingham's twelve-part Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland ('Not so poetical as some of your things--but O so clever), this may have been a direct hit at the Anglo-Irish poet. When the second of twelve monthly installments of Allingham's narrative poem in pentameter couplets appeared in Fraser s Magazine in December 1862, it was sandwiched between a politically tinged article on Present Position of the Church of England and Autumn Days by John Skelton, a personal essay on the joys that the season offered up the angler and sportsman. Browning's remarks Allingham on politics and deer-stalking were prefaced by the revelation that 'I began [Tire Ring and the Book] in rhymed couplets, like Laurence Bloomfield, but thought by and by I might as well have my fling, and so turned blank verse.' (1) Highly conscious of the serial periodical publication of Allingham's long poem, Browning raises a similar possibility for The Ring and the Book only quash it. (2) Most commentators have followed suit ever since. William DeVane notes Browning's prejudice against publication in and account for some of Browning's poems in Hood's Magazine Mrs. Sutherland Orr comments, fact deserves remembering in connection with his subsequent unbroken rule never write for magazines.' (3) Numerous handbooks and bibliographies nonetheless document that twenty-seven of Browning's poems first appeared in periodicals, at least one in every decade of Browning's poetic career (see appendix). To be sure, he published far fewer periodical poems than Tennyson, but hardly so few as make his resort the medium exceptional. (4) In what follows I consider what kind of audience and context he both encountered and envisioned when he published in periodicals and explore the impact of his involvement on his imaginative work. Though the personal and cultural circumstances framing each periodical poem shifted, his periodical poems prior marriage are more often linked politics or the news cycle, those after more likely register his union with Elizabeth Barrett either through participation in her networks or her own practices as a writer of periodical poetry. In Browning's final periodical poem the two strands converge: he fiercely pays tribute his late wife while deliberately exploiting the periodical's enmeshment in the news cycle attack Edward FitzGerald. Most characteristically, Browning conceptualized periodical publication as an expression of friendship networks within a gift economy. Browning's reasons for doing so are complex, a matter I return at this essay's conclusion. Conceptualizing periodical poems as gifts is likewise complex. Though Browning never objected negotiating copyrights for his books, he could have looked Byron, who gave away the copyrights of Childe Harold and The Corsair, as a precedent for giving away individual poems. In at least one instance, as we shall see, Browning's gift of a poem a periodical was an act of outright philanthropy on behalf of a disadvantaged group. The sociological model of the gift advanced by David Cheal consorts with Browning's contributions both the Monthly Repository and Hood's Magazine early in his career. Noting the inherent tension market relationships and personal relationships ... distinctive ... in capitalist societies, Cheal conceptualizes a modern gift economy as serving to construct certain kinds of voluntary relationships. …

Browning's “A Forgiveness”: A Grammatical Reading

AbstractThis reading situates Robert Browning's “A Forgiveness” in the context of popular Victorian lyrics in order to draw attention to features of the popular texts that are tellingly absent from or ironized within Browning's poem. I trace the “grammar of forgiveness” in the popular texts, outlining the often explicitly theological framework that guides how the language of forgiveness is used and to what intended effect. This linguistic exploration also demonstrates that Browning's title – now a curious phrase – was not unusual at the time; it was often employed in the period to make distinctions between human and divine forgiveness. The study juxtaposes the “grammar of forgiveness” found in the popular texts with that of Browning's poem, revealing that the speaker is, in his own macabre fashion, grammatically inventive, fusing forgiveness and retribution in his deadly response to his wife's feigned infidelity and the murderous visit to confession in which he reports how his wife died. Yet the speaker's bleak presentation of forgiveness, I argue, should not be read uncritically as expressing Browning's ethical perspective. Instead, I observe that the poem's form – the dramatic monologue – presents the reader with the opportunity for critique of the speaker's project, inviting reflection on the speaker's form of forgiveness rather than demanding its practice in the manner characteristic of the popular lyrics.

The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate (review)

Reviewed by: The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate Lindsy Lawrence (bio) Gregory Tate , The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. xi + 201, $110/£60 cloth. Gregory Tate's investigation of the ways Victorian poets explored the embodied mind is a finely constructed analysis of the intersection of psychology and poetics. Moving chronologically from the late 1820s through the end of the 1870s, Tate traces the various ways Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arthur Clough, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and the spasmodic poets fashioned the embodied mind. This study contributes to the field by more fully exploring the ways in which Victorian poets contemplated the mind's processes, physical sensations, and emotive effects. Drawing from the work of Philip Davis on intellectual culture and Isobel Armstrong on poetic theory, Tate argues for the influence of associationist psychology on Victorian poetics—in terms of both content and form. His methodology includes close reading of selected works by the poets in question as well as consideration of the work of nineteenth-century thinkers and writers on associationist psychology, physiology, evolution, and poetics. Of particular interest to readers of VPR will be Tate's use of periodical poetry reviews from a range of journals, including the Athenaeum, Edinburgh Review, Examiner, London Quarterly Review, North British Review, Monthly Repository, and Westminster Review. While this is not a work devoted to periodical study, Tate does more than merely mine the periodical record. The first chapter analyzing Tennyson's and Browning's early works, in particular, uses contemporary periodical reviews to establish how both poets and reviewers drew from Romantic discourse on poetic feeling and early associationist psychology. [End Page 572] Tate also demonstrates how these poets were influenced by the emerging science of psychology through careful attention to print history. In his later chapters on Tennyson, Browning, and Eliot, Tate uses the contents of these writers' libraries to support his claims about their use of psychological theory. This evidence is most compelling in the chapter on Browning's epic psychology in The Ring and the Book. Tate notes two physiological psychology books in the Brownings' collection—Julius Althaus's The Functions of the Brain (1884) and James John Garth Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connexion with Man (1851)—arguing that Browning "was aware of the tenets of physiological psychology" (167). While it is an argument of correlation, his later suggestion—that Browning also would have been familiar with James Hinton's two articles on psychology and the physical processes of the brain, published in the Cornhill in 1862, and later George Henry Lewes's "The Heart and the Brain," published in the Fortnightly Review in 1865—is supported by convincing biographical evidence. Browning was asked in March 1862 to edit the Cornhill, and he wrote to Isabella Blagden in August 1865 praising the first installment of Anthony Trollope's The Belton Estate, which appeared in the same issue as Lewes's article. The strength of this evidence adds weight to Tate's close reading of Browning's poem. Overall, this work elegantly explores the intersection of nineteenth-century poetics and psychology. Lindsy Lawrence University of Arkansas, Fort Smith Lindsy Lawrence Lindsy Lawrence is Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. She teaches a variety of courses on nineteenth-century British literature, with special attention to publication history, gender roles, and the conventions of serial fiction. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining how domestic serials functioned as part of the editorial voice of the nineteenth-century family literary magazine. She is co-director of the Periodical Poetry Index. Copyright © 2013 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century by Michael Allis (review)

British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in Long Nineteenth Century. By Michael Allis. (Music in Britain, 1600-1900.) Wood - bridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012. [xii, 320 p. ISBN 9781843837305. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.Contributing to ever-diversifying field of interdisciplinary scholarship on nineteenth-century British music, Michael Allis's exploration of vibrant and diverse musical-literary correspondence in this period (p. 6) breaks new ground by engaging with British composers and their (p. 2). Allis thus expedites canonization of compositions of Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, Granville Bantock, and Edward Elgar, whose text settings, collaborations, and programmatic compositions are explored in five main chapters of this book. Allis states that literary perspective is adopted a 'way in' to appreciating selected late nineteenth-century British composers and their (p. 3). His other purpose is to elucidate modern reception of musical-literary connections he proposes.The scholarly erudition of this book is unimpeachable, and Allis's voracity is expressed through long, indented quotations whose frequency is almost excessive. With their frequent subheadings, chapters' interiors can be discursive; enriching as many of digressions are, some, like background on Elgar and Ernest Newman (pp. 200-5) and discussion about Straussian parallels of In South (pp. 249-52), call for compression or even excision. The density is leavened by lucidity of Allis's prose and frequency of both musical and tabular examples.Chapter 1 chronicles collaboration between Parry and Robert Bridges (1844-1930) on Invocation to Music (1895). Allis partly attributes disagreements, and Bridges' ultimate disillusionment and publication of an alternative version of poem in 1896, to misgivings about Parry's declamatory approach to text setting. Instructively, Allis includes Gustav Holst's setting of 1896 Invocation text to represent Bridges' favored approach.In Chapter 2, Allis surveys Stanford's numerous Tennysonian works and includes some fascinating evidence of manner of reciting his own poetry: figure 2.1 (pp. 68-71) shows Parry's transcription of recitation of Choric Song from The Lotus-Eaters, on which pauses, breaths, and vocal intonations are annotated. The discussion of Stanford's Symphony No. 2 in D minor, subtitled Elegiac and prefaced by section 70 from In Memoriam, is undermined by flimsy parallels between music and text that epitomize hazards of speculative or unsolicited musical-literary connections. Allis likens the stuttering rhythmic dislocation that introduces second idea of Stan - ford's first movement to Tennyson's ocular uncertainty (p. 118), expressed through haunting images such as hollow masks of night, Cloud-towers, and shadowy thoroughfares of thought. These images seem several worlds away from Stanford's jaunty thematic preparation, whose sforzando diminished sevenths are jocular, not phantasmagoric. More outlandish still is suggestion that concatenation of images had any bearing on Stanford's slow movement, in which the cello solo in bar 64 and the agitated viola repetitions in bar 128 (pp. 118-19) little more consternation within pastoral idyll than a fence post or a nettle.Chapter 3 attracts particular curiosity because of unfamiliarity of its musical repertory: songs by Bantock, followed by Fifine at Fair, a substantial orchestral work based on a dramatic monologue by Robert Browning (1812-89). Allis counteracts allegations of non-specificity of musical portrayal in Fifine with a closer reading of music that an awareness of Browning's poem might generate (p. 134). Allis's detailed mapping of musical representation onto text is informed by dynamic relationships that inhere in any dramatic monolog between speaker and poet, and between speaker and reader: Bantock's Fifine can be seen as an effective exploration of speaker-narrator's voice, relationship between speaker and his character/ auditors, and specific poetic imagery (p. …

Robert Browning’s Homesickness

Robert Browning's Home-Thoughts, from Abroad is conventionally known as one of the most patriotic poems in the English language. Although the poem in its original print context is the first of three dramatic monologues, it is invariably seen in popular British culture, as well as in the history of its print circulation in the nineteenth century, as a stand-alone lyric poem celebrating the best of English nationhood. poem has attracted surprisingly little attention from critics, perhaps because of difficulty with placing its apparent expression of English nationalism within the context of Browning's more uneasy investigations of the construction of nationhood and of cosmopolitanism. This essay argues that Home-Thoughts, from Abroad is a deceptively simple poem that in fact interrogates the very patriotism it has been taken to celebrate. Furthermore, the poem is an important part of Browning's experimentation with the dramatic lyric form, and particularly the concept of voice in relation to proximity and distance. Home-Thoughts, from Abroad reveals the importance of reading Browning's poems as expressive and interrogative at the very same time. In addition, the complex hybrid genre adopted in the poem participates in nineteenth-century discussions about the relation between England and Europe, in a way that recalls Mary Louise Pratt's concept of over-determined social spaces where cultures encounter one another, and jostle for position, often within asymmetrical and complex power structures. poem's fundamental dynamic between home and the foreign suggests the importance of border crossing, a movement within and between contact zones, across frontiers and boundaries that are geographical, cultural, political and textual: a movement that, I argue, structures the very concept of the lyric poet itself, always a vital concern for Browning. In a recent and hugely popular endeavor by the British Broadcasting Corporation to record major poems by famous actors, the actor Geoffrey Palmer reads Home-Thoughts, from Abroad with music playing softly in the background. (1) choice of the Largo section (second movement) of Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony is important, especially to British ears, because it cites a previous and famous use of this section as the soundtrack (arranged for brass band) to a series of well-known television advertisements for bread, directed by Ridley Scott, and much replayed. advertisement was voted in 2006 the most-loved advertisement in Britain, for the nostalgic portrayal of a northern town with a small boy pushing a bike up cobbled streets and carrying loaves of Hovis, associating the packaged bread with what is quintessentially English. (2) In fact, the popular commercial Classic FM station in Britain reported that it was inundated with requests for the Hovis music, originally composed to commemorate the discovery of the Americas (see Byrne). It might seem peculiar to associate Robert Browning with a loaf of brown bread. But the BBC recitation of Home-Thoughts, from Abroad chose a canny patriotic soundtrack. Subtitled The greatest poems, the finest voices, glorious music, the Words for You series of recited poems can be purchased as a CD and seen on YouTube (where it has its own TV channel)) Palmer is perhaps at first glance an unlikely choice, known for his deadpan humor and stuffy, middle-class buffoonery, as his Wikipedia entry puts it, in portrayals of such popular British sit-com characters as Reggie Perrin's brother-in-law in Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin and the phlegmatic husband in Butterflies. (4) But Browning's poem suits such an actor perfectly, for like all Browning's dramatic lyrics, Home-Thoughts, from Abroad is in fact supremely ironic. In the nineteenth century, the poem was seen as a quintessential expression of English patriotism. It was reprinted, for example, in Mary Isabella Lovejoy's Poetry of the Seasons anthology of 1898 as exemplary of spring. …

Hardy’s Browning: Refashioning the Lyric

Ostensibly, Robert Browning (1812-1889) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) have little in common beyond their shared fascination with Percy Shelley's poetry, an idiosyncratic poetic idiom, and mutual attendance at London gatherings of literati in the 1880s. (1) Even though the elder poet's reactions to Hardy and his writing remain unknown, Robert Browning had a measurable impact on his successor. Hardy may have expressed his extreme frustration in a letter to Edmund Gosse over Browning's optimism and faith; yet owned five editions of Browning's poetry, including one given to him by Florence Henniker in 1894, which annotated; also possessed copies of privately-printed criticism by Browning, as well as Pen Browning's catalogue of the sale of his father's property; even saved reviews of Browning's various volumes. Indeed, read and re-read Browning's work for sixty years. (2) Hardy transcribed lines from the poetry into his notebooks and commented on them; copied excerpts from the Brownings' letters to each other and, in an essay for Academy, selected their published letters as one of two favorite books of the year 1899. In a marginal comment in the Browning section of his copy of English Poets, now in the Dorset County Museum, described Browning's processes of thought as often scientific in their precision and remarked that Browning's conclusions to his poems were sudden. (3) Hardy also read G. K. Chesterton's 1911 biography Robert Browning. Finally, forty years after its publication, Hardy inserted verses from Browning's By the Fire-Side (1853) among the ghostly literary voices that Jude Fawley hears in Oxford. Browning thus indubitably attracted Hardy, both personally and professionally. It is hardly surprising that Hardy's favorite Browning poem should have been The Statue and the Bust, with its emphasis on the lost chances and postponed fulfillment that become ironically translated into inert, mutually regarding statues of lovers (Felkin, p. 206). That Shelleyan conjunction of desire and art spoke to Hardy so deeply that repeatedly quoted it in his short stories and novels: The Waiting Supper, An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress, A Changed Man, Desperate Remedies, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. As readers of Well-Beloved know, The Statue and the Bust directly informed Hardy's final farewell to fictional romance and English Romanticism. Hardy's investment in Browning also led him to sites associated with both the Shelleys and the Brownings. On an Italian holiday with his first wife Emma in 1887, not only visited the Piazza dell' Annunziata where The Statue and the Bust was said to have been set, but also paid his respects at Elizabeth Barrett Browning's grave (Millgate, p. 200). Hardy sent a presentation copy of Wessex Tales to Browning for his birthday in 1888; decades later, when ill and confined to bed, the eighty-seven-year-old Hardy was still coming to terms with his predecessor. On the evening before died, asked his second wife, Florence, to read aloud Browning's Ben Ezra. following evening near dusk, he asked his wife to repeat to him a verse [the four-line stanza] from the Rubdiydt of Omar Khayydm, beginning Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth--, a stanza that linked the two poems' contrary responses to the Biblical potter image from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Romans. Hardy died that day (Millgate, p. 480; see also Paulin, p. 70). Hardy's wish to hear these two excerpts could have been arbitrary, but the details suggest otherwise. His illness had become severe enough to make household members suspect was dying. verses in question went to the center of his life's work. Hardy's critics have pointed out that whereas Browning's Rabbi constructs man as a pot perfected by God, Fitzgerald's speaker constructs man as a pot molded and abandoned by an uncaring universe. Was Hardy giving each view a hearing? …

Browning, Renaissance Painting, and the Problem of Raphael

You and I would rather read that volume, (Taken to his beating bosom by it) Lean and list bosom-beats of Rafael, Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas-- Her, San Sisto names, and Her, Foligno, Her, that visits Florence in a vision, Her, that's left with lilies in Louvre-- Seen by us and all world in circle. (1) One Word More laments loss of hundred love sonnets that Raphael had written to his mistress, Margherita, and cherishes shared knowledge of this historical detail--this small secret from Filippo Baldinucci--as quality that distinguishes Elizabeth's and Robert's veneration of painter from that of encircling world. The awareness of loss rather than loss itself is what matters most, since if sonnets had survived, then, no doubt, world would have closed in on them too, and because regret defers question of whether Raphael's poetry could really be more interesting than his painting. But importance of losses and discoveries, of knowledge of such things to cognoscenti, and of sharing of arcana with a readership, typified Robert Browning's response to Italian Renaissance art. Because he valued sense of discovering behind work, often in striking or improbable biographical details, and then tended to posit such life as origin and key to painting, his enthusiasm has sometimes been dismissed as inexpert or unsophisticated. (2) Relying on Vasari's Lives and Baldinucci's Notizie has obvious limitations, but centrality of biography tailored with Browning's perception of a new emphasis upon man as subject in paintings themselves. Browning's fascination for so-called primitives (Where you style them, you of little wit, / Old Master This and Early Other [Old Pictures in Florence, 8:60-61]), whom he began to collect, after a fashion, in Italy, is still essentially a poet's interest in what One Word More calls an alien to artist's(8.69). If his particular interest in and championing of Italian art of fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the season/Of Art's spring-birth so dim and dewy, (Old Pictures in Florence, XXLII.177-178) therefore attests to what Walter Pater would describe as partial alienation from its own limitations whereby one art form would be observed to pass into condition of some other Browning's poems about painting may have something in common with other or revivalist modes of thinking, and most obviously with early Pre-Raphaelitism. (3) The primitivist revival had its roots in German Romanticism in last part of eighteenth century, but its purest expression came perhaps in early years of nineteenth century from Nazarene community in monastery of San Isidoro, in Rome. Valuing what they perceived to be closer spiritual connection to an ascetic Christianity in early Italian painters, Nazarene group emphasized devotional employment of images and celebrated simplicity and clarity of iconographical traditions--all of which implied a sympathetic relationship to Catholicism. Purity, of course, is always in one way or another issue, and in first years of Pre- Raphaelite movement, at least as it was later to be memorialized by William Holman Hunt, a similar reverence for what Hunt described as naive traits of frank expression and unaffected grace in early Italian art, had inspired Brotherhood to pick its quarrel with Victorian art establishment. (4) Browning, like many others, was influenced by Alexis Francois Rio's impassioned revaluation of Catholic art in De la poesie chretienne, first published in 1835 and later added to as De l'art chretien (1861-67), as well as by art history of his friend Anna Jameson, who transmitted Rio's ideas to an English audience and made them more palatable to Protestant sensibility, and he was also familiar with Francis Palgrave's Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842), which, again, set about re-evaluating early Italian painting. …