Hewette Elwell Joyce (ed.)

Browning is clearly one of the most scholarly of the Victorian poets. The ghastly Porphyria (which is morally revolting), describing the strangler who uses the hair of his victim, but not Sordello (which is academically difficult). I love Browning for his monologues - one can read them aloud for the amusement of the audience of oneself. The meditative "Abt Vogler" and "Death in the Desert", and the exciting "The Laboratory" show his range. It is impossible to generalize the Browning opus.

Few long-lived authors mature with greater range but far less change than Browning. This collection exposes a single philosophy. He has Rabbi Ben Ezra say the "low world can value in a trice", showing that spiritual development rather than material accomplishment is the true accomplishment. Browning repeatedly frowns upon the "success" which the world seems to conceive, and shows it to be profoundly misplaced. In "Andrea del Sarto", the success of the "faultless painter" is revealed to be in a dead end -- a pathetic failure: "All is silver-gray / Placid and perfect with my art; the worse."

The conception of God is much larger than is contained in the world's religions. However, Browning conveys a deeply if purely spiritual divinity of Christ in "Death in the Desert". It is His Love which is the summum bonum. In the face of rationalism, Browning clings to Belief and the optimism of unshakable faith. The Italian painter, "Fra Lippo Lippi" speaks for him: "This world's no blot for us, / Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: / To find its meaning is my meat and drink."

Reading these poems - fascinating; and yet I become aware that he has no "rythym". The words have their own calling, individually wrapped. His description of the Italian painters is a painting not a tune. Great beauty and "vigor".

His poems to and inspired by the Love of "EBB": "One Word More" -- all XIX versos woven with Dante and the favored painters. [179]

Selections from his Dramatic and Romance Plays and monologues, Prologues, Epilogues, Idyls, and Epistle of the Arab Physician. Includes the essay poem "Why I am a Liberal":

"Why?" Because all I haply can and do,
All that I am now, all I hope to be,--
Whence comes it save from fortune setting free
Body and soul the purpose to pursue,
God traced for both? If fetters, not a few,
Of prejudice, convention, fall from me,
These shall I bid men--each in his degree
Also God-guided--bear, and gayly, too?

But little do or can the best of us:
That little is achieved through Liberty.
Who, then, dares hold, emanicpated thus,
His fellow shall continue bound? Not I,
Who live, love, labor freeley, nor discuss
A brother's right to freedom. That is "Why."
(1885)… (mehr)