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Robert Browning (1812 - 1889)
Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell (a suburb of London),
the first child of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His mother was a fervent
Evangelical and an accomplished pianist. Mr. Browning had angered his own
father and forgone a fortune: the poet's grandfather had sent his son to
oversee a West Indies sugar plantation, but the young man had found the
institution of slavery so abhorrent that he gave up his prospects and
returned home, to become a clerk in the Bank of England. On this very
modest salary he was able to marry, raise a family, and to acquire a library
of 6000 volumes. He was an exceedingly well-read man who could recreate the
seige of Troy with the household chairs and tables for the benefit of his
inquisitive son.
Indeed, most of the poet's education came at home. He was an extremely
bright child and a voracious reader (he read through all fifty volumes of
the Biographie Universelle) and learned Latin, Greek, French and
Italian by the time he was fourteen. He attended the University of London
in 1828, the first year it opened, but left in discontent to pursue his own
reading at his own pace. This somewhat idiosyncratic but extensive
education has led to difficulties for his readers: he did not always realize
how obscure were his references and allusions.
In the 1830's he met the actor William Macready and tried several times to
write verse drama for the stage. At about the same time he began to
discover that his real talents lay in taking a single character and allowing
him to discover himself to us by revealing more of himself in his speeches
than he suspects-the characteristics of the dramatic monologue. The reviews
of Paracelsus (1835) had been mostly encouraging, but the difficulty
and obscurity of his long poem Sordello (1840) turned the critics
against him, and for many years they continued to complain of obscurity even
in his shorter, more accessible lyrics.
In 1845 he saw Elizabeth Barrett's Poems and contrived to meet her. Although she was an invalid and very much under the control of a domineering
father, the two married in September 1846 and a few days later eloped to
Italy, where they lived until her death in 1861. The years in Florence were
among the happiest for both of them. Her love for him was demonstrated in
the Sonnets from the Portugese, and to her he dedicated Men and
Women, which contains his best poetry. Public sympathy for him after
her death (she was a much more popular poet during their lifetimes) surely
helped the critical reception of his Collected Poems (1862) and
Dramatis Personae (1863). The Ring and the Book (1868-9), based on
an "old yellow book" which told of a Roman murder and trial, finally won him
considerable popularity. He and Tennyson were now mentioned together as the
foremost poets of the age. Although he lived and wrote actively for another
twenty years, the late '60s were the peak of his career. His influence
continued to grow, however, and finally lead to the founding of the Browning
Society in 1881. He died in 1889, on the same day that his final volume of
verse, Asolando, was published. He is buried in Poet's Corner of
Westminster Abbey.
Biography by: Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin
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Copyright © 2003-2008 Gunnar Bengtsson, Poetry Connection. All Rights Reserved.
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