A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z


Robert Browning (1812-1889)

LINKS

http://65.107.211.206/rb/rbov.html

This link connects you to the Victorian Web entry on Robert Browning. Here you will find an extensive archive of primary and secondary works covering Robert Browning's writings in terms of major themes and patterns of imagery, as well as the political contexts, social movements, and intellectual backgrounds defining the poet's era.

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=185

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Robert Browning including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

BIOGRAPHY

Browning's father was a nonconformist who gave up a fortune rather than manage his family's West Indies sugar plantation. Nevertheless, as a bank clerk, Robert Senior provided his son with an extensive library collection that whetted his appetite for a life of letters. Attending the University of London for only a year in 1828, Browning was largely self-taught and undertook his own studies in Latin, Greek, French and Italian authors. The eccentricity of his education, however, crept into the obscure references in his early volumes of verse such as Pauline (1833), Paracelsus (1834), and Bells and Pomegranates (1841-1846), which were not particularly well received by critics. It was only through the influence of the theater and such actors as William Macready that Browning turned to the dramatic monologue verse that proved to be his signature form in the Collected Poems (1862) and Dramatis Personae (1863). By then, his passionate marriage to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, begun in 1846, had been cut short by her death in 1861. Returning from Florence to London, Browning devoted the next decade to his major oeuvre The Ring and the Book (1869). After his death in 1889, Browning's poetic craft in such memorable dramatic monologues as "My Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" had a lasting influence on the course of modern verse and particularly in the careers of its major practitioners such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Bright, Michael. Robert Browning's Rondures Brave. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1996.

Hair, Donald S. Robert Browning's Langauge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Hawlin, Stefan. The Complete Critical Guide to Robert Browning. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Howe, Elisabeth A. The Dramatic Monologue. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

O'Neill, Patricia. Robert Browning and Twentieth Century Criticism. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995.

Roberts, Adam. Robert Browning Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

Wood, Sarah. Robert Browning: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Woolford, John and Daniel Karlin. Robert Browning. New York: Longman, 1996.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER