I. Introduction: The Limits of Reanimation When Robert Browning published his 1868-89 book-length murder poem, The Ring and Book, his reputation as poet special gifts of intellect and originality that were at same time put in service of poetics of great crudity and jolting violence seemed once again confirmed. (1) I felt ... like creature with one leg and one wing, half hopping, half flying, Browning's friend William Allingham said after reading poem's first volume, while others characterized poem as incongruous materials incapable of forming harmonious or as simultaneously life-like and morbid anatomy. (2) These friends and reviewers, torn as they were between awe at poem's intellectual ambition and disgust at its aesthetic execution, envisioned their ambivalence as states of bodily transformation and incomplete states at that: halfway from legs to wings, from parts to whole, from life to death. Without acknowledging directly grotesque corporeality so prevalent in many of Browning's most well-known dramatic monologues, these readers nonetheless see almost-changed body as metaphor for Browning's poetic strangeness: strangeness characterized by formal tension, as historian Thomas Carlyle would have it, between Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and long dramatic monologue, or, as Browning himself wrote in his Essay on Shelley, between poetry that reproduces things external and poetry that is radiance and aroma of [the poet's] personality. (3) In Browning's dramatic monologues, as in responses above, changing body--specifically, in monologues, once-dead body, almost-alive-again body--is locus for aesthetic experimentation that both critiques poetry's inevitably subjective relation to facts--historical facts, observable facts, and facts of literary influence--and uses that relationship as basis for generic innovation. The reanimated body, whether appearing in poems like The Ring and Book or in shorter dramatic monologues like Porphyria's Lover and My Last Duchess, becomes figure through which Browning considers fraught relation between unassailable historical materiality and original aesthetic practice--between dictates of what has come before and desire to create something new out of it. The dramatic monologue, in its dual capacity functioning as critical and always-ironic foil to multiple projects of aesthetic so in vogue during nineteenth century--the Arthurian revival in art and literature, vogue for museum exhibitions that recreated ancient tombs, and phenomena like magic lantern shows and spirit photography--as form becomes both self- conscious vehicle for poems of reanimation and mode of reanimation itself. While critics have argued that we can see dramatic monologue as a form of verbal resuscitation of dead, quasi-Spiritualist voicing of dead men and women, (4) and Victorian reviewers especially found in Tennyson's dramatic monologues the secret of transmigration of soul, dramatic monologues in which dead come to life in turn call our attention to limits of poet's reanimating power by exposing inherent subjectivity of any resuscitative poetic project. (5) These monologues embody fictive and necessarily inventive nature of aesthetic resuscitation: nothing can come back from dead unless poet reanimates it. Browning uses his dramatic monologues to draw an analogy between corporeal reanimation and poetic practice, and in doing so probes, critiques, and reinvents process by which new, living poetry can emerge from intransigent bodies of past. His necropoetics bring long-dead voices back to life, but not with expectation that his monologists will speak truth. Rather, inalterable fact of their deaths creates condition necessary for Browning to scrutinize and to relish imaginative truths his own poetics of aesthetic resurrection could reveal. …
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Jun 30, 2024
Bharathi Devi P 
Open Access