Browning

Robert Browning: Day 1

"You speak out, you,--I only make men & women speak--give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me: but I am going to try . . ."
Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barret, 13 January 1845

Points of Reflection

1. in the original preface to his play Strafford (1837), Browning wrote that he was concerned with depicting "Action in Character, rather than Character in Action." Do his poems evince this same preference for psychological motivation over physical action?

2. Browning claimed in 1845 that Elizabeth Barret's poetry was superior to his "monodrams" (what we today call "dramatic monologues") because his "objective" and dramatic poetry only made other "men and women speak," whereas EB herself spoke through her poetry. Is RB correct, or do his poems encourage us to commit the biographical fallacy and read therein something about his own life and values?

3. Responding to RB's self-deprecatory claim (above), EBB claimed "You have in your vision two worlds--or to use the language of the schools of the day, you are both subjective & objective in the habits of mind. You can deal both with abstract thought & with human passion in the most passionate sense." Does her judgment seem appropriate?

4. With today's readings in mind, consider the validity of the critical opinions below:

Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (1957)

“Browning delighted in making a case for the apparently immoral position” (86).
“Even where the speaker is specifically concerned with a moral question, he arrives at his answer empirically, as a necessary outcome of conditions within the poem and not through appeal to an outside moral code” (98).

William Irvine and Park Honan's The Book, The Ring, and The Poet (1974)

“ The best monologues seem to mean five things at once; they admit of directly conflicting interpretations . . .” (336).

5. When I taught high school in the mid-90's, some of my students had difficulty distinguishing narrative voice from authorial intent: they instinctively aligned the opinions and words of Browning's characters with Browning himself. For those of us willing to commit the intentional fallacy, what subtle clues (linguistic, metaphoric, psychological, historical) does Browning provide to help us determine each poem's intended "message"?

Wells Cathedral, plate 1 (1851)
from Cockerell

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu