bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Browning and Shelley
Authors: Keenan Richard C.
Published: October 2008

The question of Shelley's influence on the young Robert Browning is hardly a disputed one, but the question of how far it continues into the life and work of the later Browning is quite a different matter. While the early influence is readily acknowledged, the later hardly receives the amount of attention it deserves. The consensus among critics has long been that in his youth Browning had a great enthusiasm for Shelley, an enthusiasm clearly apparent in Pauline and Paracelsus, but abruptly extinguished in Sordello. Generally speaking, it would seem that Browning's ardent enthusiasm for Shelley the poet ends with Sordello in 1840, just as his respect for Shelley the man ends in 1856, with the discovery that he had abandoned his first wife. Any evidence for a lapse of his disaffection in later life seems effectively countered by Browning's own testimony in a letter written in 1885 to F. J. Furnivall, refusing the presidency of the newly formed Shelley Society: “For myself, I painfully contrast my notions of Shelley the man and Shelley, well, even the poet, with what they were sixty years ago, when I only had his works, for a certainty, and took his character on trust.” With these highlights of the relationship, most Browning critics and biographers terminate the discussion.
The Brownings and Mrs. Kinney: A Record of Their Friendship
Authors: Bosco Ronald A.
Published: October 2008

Europe has long held a special attraction for American artists of various tastes and disciplines. One of the first to call his countrymen's attention to Europe as a source of creative impulse for the fertile American imagination was Washington Irving. When writing in 1819 that “never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery,” Irving admitted that only “Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical associations.” There, he argued, “were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly-cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom.” Although America was young, bustling, democratic, and full of promise, “Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age.” “Every mouldering stone was a chronicle,” so that, as Irving asserted, “to wander over the scenes of [Europe's] renouned achievement [was] to tread … in the footsteps of antiquity … to escape, in short, from the commonplace realities of the present, and lose [oneself] among the shadowy grandeurs of the past.”
“Andrea del Sarto (Called ‘The Faultless Painter’)” and William Page (Called “The American Titian”)
Authors: Markus Julia
Published: October 2008

In 1853 William Page, an American painter living in Rome who was known for his portraits of men and women, discovered what he considered to be a new scientific way of measuring the proportions of the human body. He was inspired by a favorite authority of the Swedenborgians, the Book of Revelation. In an article published in 1879, “The Measure of a Man,” Page remembered:

While seeking for truth of form and adjusting the proportions of my manikins, a remarkable statement in the Revelation engaged my attention: “And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel.”– Revelation, xxi (see 12-17 inclusive).
Henry James' “Half-man”: The Legacy of Browning in “The Madonna of the Future”
Authors: Ross Michael L.
Published: October 2008

Thomas Sergeant Perry, Who in 1858 was a schoolfellow of Henry James at Newport, recalls the fifteen-year-old future author “as an uninterested scholar…. I have not forgotten his amusement at seeing in the Manual of English Literature that we were studying, in the half page devoted to Mrs. Browning, that she had married R. Browning, ‘himself no mean poet.’ This compact information gave him great delight, for we were reading Browning.” Perry's comment is both intriguing and significant, in view of the close and enduring acquaintance, at first literary and later personal as well, that James was to establish with the husband of Elizabeth Barrett. Browning was, in fact, destined to play no mean part in the younger writer's artistic formation. James himself, however, in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), attributes his introduction to Browning's poetry to the powerful influence of the young painter John La Farge, whom he came to know during the same period at Newport: “[La Farge] revealed to us Browning for instance; and this, oddly enough, long after Men and Women had begun (from our Paris time on, if I remember) to lie upon our parents' book-table.
Form and Sense in Browning's The Inn Album
Authors: Watkins Charlotte C.
Published: October 2008

“Modern Poetry” was the caption of Carlo Pellegrini's caricature illustrating Vanity Fair's article on Browning (“the best of our professors of modern poetry”), containing the first notice of The Inn Album, which was published on 19 November 1875. Viewed in retrospect, the caption seems particularly apt as an announcement of The Inn Album. In content, the poem was modern, contemporary to the point of topicality. The very selection of contemporary upper-middle-class life as a subject was an especially modern undertaking in the mid-seventies, within a twelve-month period that included both Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, the latter of which Lewes described as, like Middlemarch, “a story of English life but of our own day, and dealing for the most part in a higher sphere of Society.” The Inn Album found its material in contemporary manners, just as Browning's poems that had preceded it in the seventies had addressed themselves, in various ways, to other aspects of contemporary life. In addition, references in The Inn Album to contemporary styles in the arts call attention to the poem as a poem and relate it, also, to modern art.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Her Brother Alfred: Some Unpublished Letters
Authors: Hudson Ronald
Published: October 2008

Alfred Price Barrett Moulton-Barrett, known to his family as “Daisy,” was born at Hope End, Herefordshire, on 20 May 1820, the sixth son and tenth child of Edward and Mary Moulton-Barrett.

He was fourteen years younger than his eldest sister Elizabeth, whose essay, “Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character,” reprinted in pp. 121–33 of this volume, shows that she already “read Homer in the original with delight inexpressible, together with Virgil.” She had also completed in 1817–18 her first major work in verse, The Battle of Marathon, which appeared in print, through her father's indulgence, in the year of Alfred's birth. Thus she was already established as a scholar and a poetess, already somewhat set apart from her brothers, except the beloved “Bro” with whom she shared the study of the classics.
Robert Browning's Evangelical Heritage
Authors: Maynard John
Published: October 2008

When, in an episode in the long courtship by mail between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Elizabeth “confessed” that she was to be numbered, in religion, among “those schismatiques of Amsterdam” Donne talks of, Browning, always the opportunist in the affair, fired back: “Can it be you, my own you past putting away, you are a schismatic and frequenter of Independent Dissenting Chapels? And you confess this to me—whose father and mother went this morning to the very Independent Chapel where they took me, all these years back, to be baptized—and where they heard, this morning, a sermon preached by the very minister who officiated on that other occasion!” The Independent Chapel in question was, of course, the Locks Fields Chapel, or, as it came to be called, the York Street Congregational Church, at Walworth, about a mile from the Brownings' Camberwell home, south of London; and the minister was a George Clayton. Browning's credentials as a schismatic were, however, less obvious than he implies. On his father's side Browning's people, in fact, were members of the Church of England (his grandmother was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman), and in the 1830's he and his sister also attended evening services at Camden Chapel, a separate offshoot from the parish church of St. Giles, in order to hear the more “eloquent and earnest” sermons of Henry Melvill, “Melvill of the Golden Mouth,” whose sermons were also highly approved by John Ruskin. If Clayton's Independent Chapel was nonetheless the family church, there can be no doubt that this was because of the influence of Browning's mother, already a member there before marriage. About 1820, her husband, raised in the Church of England, followed her and officially joined the York Street Congregation.
Browning's Plays: Prologue to Men and Women
Authors: Sullivan Mary Rose
Published: October 2008

The eight plays Robert Browning wrote before Men and Women (1855) are the least read and, by common consent, the least successful of his works, but they deserve attention from anyone interested in Browning's ideas. In agreeing that the blame must be divided between the “romantic temper of the age” and the poet's “inability to objectify conflict,” critics have dismissed Browning's dramatic efforts as “laboratory experiments” which taught him mainly that he could never be a dramatist and should restrict himself to psychological analysis in poetry. But if Browning was uncertain about how to say what he wanted, he was not at all uncertain about what he wanted to say, and a study of the repeated patterns of theme and characterization in the plays shows that the experience of writing for the stage provided an invaluable opportunity for him to work out his developing moral philosophy. The demands of stage presentation forced him to crystallize his unresolved ethical theories and led him to that study of motivation without which the great character studies of Men and Women could not have been written.
Paracelsus Once Again: A Study in Imagery
Authors: Hawthorne Mark D.
Published: October 2008

Nobody will again consider Paracelsus “the work that posterity will probably estimate as Browning's greatest.” Too much critical attention has elucidated its shortcomings. Nonetheless, the amount of comment that it has provoked indicates its importance in Browning's canon. Most of this comment deals with Browning's theme; much deals exclusively with the relation between Paracelsus and Aprile; and a few commentators have attempted to evaluate the place of Paracelsus in Browning's artistic evolution. But, surprisingly, outside of C. Willard Smith's provocative but narrowly-focused study of the star-imagery in Paracelsus and a few passing comments by J. Hillis Miller, William O. Raymond, and F. S. Boas, little attention has concentrated on imagery in the drama. Park Honan, perhaps overly evaluating the drama by the light of Browning's later achievement, says that “one feels again and again its almost total irrelevance to character” and refers to it as “superfluous adornment.” However, tracing several of the image patterns of Paracelsus through their development and seeing how they interweave illustrates that imagery plays a functional role in integrating form, character portrayal, and theme, thereby throwing additional light on Browning's artistry.
Browning's “Saul” and the Fourfold Vision: A Neoplatonic-Hermetic Approach
Authors: Dahl Curtis , Brewer Jennifer L.
Published: October 2008

Over the years Browning's poem “Saul,” which he himself chose as one of his finest lyrics, has received much critical attention. It has been analyzed as showing the development of Browning's religious beliefs between 1845 and 1855, as an inductive approach to religious experience, as a typological account of man's growth in history toward Christianity, as an expression of Browning's Evangelical faith in the Incarnation, as an example of his use of the past to comment on the present, and as a dynamic statement of his emotional mysticism. Its rising structure and sequence of ideas have been related to Christopher Smart's “Song to David” and “Ode to Musick on St. Cecilia's Day,” to Wyatt's “Seven Penitential Psalms,” and to various minor eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works on Saul. Without contradicting this earlier criticism, we should like to suggest another possible source of idea, structure, and image. To read “Saul” in the light of the Platonic, Neoplatonic, or Hermetic tradition's concept of four hierarchical levels or stages of mystic vision can add, we believe, a new and intriguing dimension to the interpretation and appreciation of the poem's structure and significance.
“My Spiritual Face”: A Newly Discovered Portrait of Mrs. Browning
Authors: Peterson William S.
Published: October 2008

The subject of many paintings, drawings, and photographs during the final years of her life, Elizabeth Barrett Browning never concealed her strong preference for the portrait by Field Talfourd done in Rome in 1859, which she described as her “spiritual face,” “rather a transfiguration than a literal likeness.” Robert Browning, with only slightly less enthusiasm, called it “the best in existence, perhaps.” Both Brownings distributed numerous photographic copies of it to friends and relatives; as late as 1873 Robert signalled his growing friendship with Mrs. Thomas FitzGerald by giving her a photograph of the Talfourd drawing. The portrait has been reproduced in countless books and articles about the Brownings and since 1871 has hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London. It is unquestionably the most famous likeness of Victorian England's most celebrated woman poet.
Stages in the Composition ofThe Inn Album
Authors: Crowder Ashby Bland
Published: October 2008

The Inn Albumwas published in 1875 when Browning was sixty-three years old, forty-two years afterPauline, fourteen years before he died. The year 1875 falls six years into what Kenneth Knickerbocker calls Browning's senescence (1869–89), a period during which the poet acquired wide fame yet alienated many critics. After the poems of this period were reviewed, they were largely ignored. Only recently have critics given attention toThe Inn Album, and only J. M. Hitner (in 1969) has discussed Browning's revisions of the poem—but his discussion is less than satisfactory. For example, given to oversimplification, he persistently confuses changes made in the proof stage with those made in the manuscript and says that the “last version of the MS. usually agrees with the first edition” (Hitner, p. 118), which, as we shall see, is simply not true.
“A Notion of the Troubadour's Intent”: Some Reflections on the Words in Sordello
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: October 2008

That Sordello does not require annotation can be maintained only by those to whom the words “tenzon, virlai or sirvent” are immediately familiar, or by those who regard their meaning as an irrelevance. When I began annotating the poem for the first volume of the Oxford English Texts edition of The Poetical Works, it seemed to me that my first task was to determine as precisely as possible the meaning of each individual word. In the present article I shall not be concerned with Browning's use of his sources, or with “the historical decoration” (greatly as that may seem to us to exceed what “a background requires”), but with words which may cause difficulty because they are rare or because Browning uses them in an unusual sense, and (by a natural transition) with unusual words which serve to suggest something of the literary context of the poem.
“A Splendor of Stars & Suns”: Twain as a Reader of Browning's Poems
Authors: Gribben Alan
Published: October 2008

Samuel Clemens' infatuation with the poetry of Robert Browning during and after the 1880s demonstrates the subtle dimensions in Browning's verse that a gifted oral interpreter can disclose. Whatever first attracted Clemens to the Browning canon, however, it was not the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When Clemens began courting Olivia Langdon she was already a partisan of Mrs. Browning's works, and the couple had several good-natured exchanges about the intelligibility of her poems. In a letter of 17 May 1869 Clemens jocularly alluded to “some dark & bloody mystery out of the Widow Browning”; on another occasion he turned to Livy for an explanation of obscurities inAurora Leigh.* In the second week of Livy Clemens' marriage she appended a teasing note to the letter which Clemens was writing to Mrs. Mary Mason Fairbanks, vowing that she, along with Clemens' sister and niece, “will make Mr Clemens read aloud to us in Mrs Browning—Felicity to us—but what to him?”* Around 1872 Clemens declared, in a letter written to Livy, “If they were toset meto review Mrs. Browning, it would be like asking you to deliver judgment upon the merits of a box of cigars.”
Robert Browning's Taste in Music
Authors: Richardson Malcolm
Published: October 2008

One of the constant factors in Robert Browning's life was his love of music, a love which he repaid by devoting two of the finest examples of his poetic art to musical subjects. “Abt Vogler” and “A Toccata of Galuppi's” are among the most frequently studied and anthologized poems, the latter being a particular favorite with general reader and critic alike. Yet had Browning never written these two poems, his attachment to music would have been just as apparent through the numerous references to music, concerts, and musical personalities in his other poems and his letters. In fact, Browning's knowledge of music and his status as an amateur musician are commonplaces of the Browning legend, a part of the received Gospel. But while we know a great deal about Browning's youthful training in music, his technical knowledge of musical forms, and his philosophy of music, we know very little about the important matter of where his taste in music lay. If one reads Browning's poems and letters with the express purpose of discovering his musical likes and dislikes, the results are surprising and—in terms of his “musical” poems—rather revealing, for they indicate that Browning, living in the great age of musical Romanticism, was something of a musical reactionary who looked with disdain on the great composers of his era and on their musical styles, preferring instead the forms and performing techniques of the preceding century.
Browning as a Cultural Critic: Red Cotton Night-Cap Country
Authors: Kenny Brendan
Published: October 2008

Twenty years ago interest in Browning's poetry, in England at any rate, was at a low ebb: both Eliot and Leavis had pronounced against him. The first stirrings came with Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (1957), which raised problems about the moral and epistemological aspects of the dramatic monologues. There followed in the sixties a series of books and articles reaffirming the centrality of The Ring and the Book* for the Browning canon. As a result of this “revaluation” some of the earlier long narratives, in particular Paracelsus and Sordello* received critical reappraisal. The Oxford University Press saw fit to issue a revised edition of Browning's poems from 1833 to 1864 edited by Ian Jack (1970), and Penguin filled a useful gap with its publication in 1971 of The Ring and the Book.
Tennyson's Troubled Years with Moxon & Co.: A Publishing Relationship
Authors: Hagen June Steffensen
Published: October 2008

Alfred Tennyson was often reluctant to put his poems into print. In fact, early in his career only the efforts of persuasive friends like Arthur Hallam and Edward Fitz Gerald and the dedication of a committed poetry publisher like Edward Moxon enabled the poems ever to see publication. It was only after the appearance in 1850 ofIn Memoriam, for which Moxon particularly pressed, that the forty-one-year-old Tennyson felt sure enough of his own work to make such decisions by himself. After this success, he seldom allowed the conviction of others to undermine his own judgment in the practical details of publication.
The Brownings' Correspondence: Supplement No. 2 to the Checklist
Authors: Kelley Philip , Hudson Ronald
Published: October 2008

For the second year, thanks to the courtesy of the directors of the Browning Institute and the editor of Browning Institute Studies, we are able to supplement and correct information contained in our Checklist.*
Editing Hardy
Authors: Schweik Robert C. , Piret Michael
Published: October 2008

The Phrase “editing Hardy” encompasses a range of very different tasks: Hardy's private notebooks, for example, pose some editorial problems not at all characteristic of his correspondence, and there are similar differences in the problems involved in editing his poetry as opposed to his prose fiction. In fact, somewhere in the course of “editing Hardy” one can probably find an example of almost every major kind of problem which editors of Victorian authors are likely to confront. In the space of one essay it would be of course hopeless to attempt a detailed consideration of all the various questions Hardy's texts pose for editors; yet any discussion of editing Hardy that did not attempt to come to grips with at least some of the specific editorial problems editors face would scarcely be more than a summary account of current progress. This essay, therefore, provides a general survey of the present state of the scholarly editing of Hardy's texts, but it also includes a more detailed consideration of current theory and practice in editing Hardy's prose fiction which focuses on the question of copy-text choice and uses examples drawn from the texts of Far from the Madding Crowd to illustrate one aspect of that problem.
Editorial Problems are Readers' Problems
Authors: Shillingsburg Peter L.
Published: October 2008

Victorian Literature, particularly fiction, offers both rich materials and complex problems for textual scholarship. The nineteenth is the first century for which multiple authorial manuscripts, proofs, and revised editions abound. There are major editorial projects underway for Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and perhaps more, to say nothing of the Mill and Disraeli projects. But the variety of mistakes made so far in these editions makes one wish to pull the whistle rope – stop the train and survey the course.
“Commented It Must Be”: Browning Annotating Browning
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: October 2008

When we couldn't understand a passage or a poem, I either walkt over or wrote to him, and got his explanation of it. At first I didn't take the volume with me, and he amused me very much by saying: “'Pon my word I don't know what I did mean by the poem … But I'll borrow a copy to-morrow and look at it again.”
The Editorial Problem in Clough'sAdam and Eve
Authors: Scott P. G.
Published: October 2008

Clough's poetry poses editorial problems that, if not special in kind, are certainly special in degree. The problems arise from Clough's way of writing and rewriting, so that one “poem” could in different stages be rewritten with widely divergent poetic intentions. The description that his own Mephistophelean Spirit gives inDipsychuscould stand for much of his experience in composition, and it well describes many of his manuscripts:

don't be sure — Emotions are so slippery … write verse, Burnt in disgust, then ill-restored, and left Half-made, in pencil scrawl, illegible.
Carlyle and Wordsworth
Authors: Sanders Charles Richard
Published: October 2008

In general Carlyle was not kind in dealing with the English Romantic poets. Wordsworth was no exception to the rule. As early as 4 March 1823 Carlyle cautioned Jane Welsh against admiring Wordsworth and Byron too much and Goethe too little. “Wordsworth and Byron! They [compared to Goethe] are as the Christian Ensign and Captain Bobadil before the Duke of Marlboro!” Even in treating rustics and their way of life Schiller was far superior to Wordsworth. In his Life of Schiller (1825) Carlyle wrote:

Among our own writers, who have tried such subjects, we remember none that has succeeded equally with Schiller. One potent but ill-fated genius has, in far different circumstances and with far other means, shown that he could have equalled him: the Cotter's Saturday Night of Burns is, in its own humble way, as quietly beautiful, as simplex munditiis, as the scenes of Tell. No other has even approached them; though some gifted persons have attempted it. Mr. Wordsworth is no ordinary man; nor are his pedlars, and leech-gatherers, and dalesmen, without their attractions and their moral; but they sink into whining drivellers beside Rösselmann the Priest, Ulric the Smith, Hans of the Wall, and the other sturdy confederates of Rütli.
The Reader's Convenience
Authors: Haight Gordon S.
Published: October 2008

None of the principles that should guide an editor of letters seems to me more important than considering the reader's convenience. For the most part collections of letters are consulted by people searching for particular bits of information, and the editor's duty is to make it available as easily as possible. A reader who may be unfamiliar with books mentioned frequently in the notes ought not to be confronted with cryptic acronyms like LJOP and TLOP, which force him to consult a table at the beginning of the volume or even, in a multi-volumed work, in Volume I to discover that these puzzles stand for The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems and Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems. For the reader's convenience it would be more considerate to use a short and easily identifiable title. Tristram fills hardly any more space than the four capitals TLOP.
Editing the Brownings' Correspondence: An Editorial Manual
Authors: Kelley Philip , Hudson Ronald
Published: October 2008

Our projected forty-volume edition of The Brownings' Correspondence had its origin in our intention to collect data for a checklist of the letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But as so much new material kept surfacing, we turned our thoughts increasingly towards a collected edition of their letters. Discussions between ourselves, and with various experts in the field, led us to announce in print, in 1963, our intention to undertake this project. The first four volumes, covering the years 1809 through 1841, are nearing completion.
“Natural Evolution” in “Dramatic Essences” from Robert Browning to T. S. Eliot
Authors: Davies Cory Bieman
Published: October 2008

A consciously modern critic, in a review of 14 May 1920 in the Athenaeum, recommended that for the twentieth century poet “the natural evolution would be to proceed in the direction indicated by Browning; to distil the dramatic essences, if we can, and infuse them into some other liquor.” Since, in this critic's eyes, Browning “invented the dramatic monologue,” a form responsive to the demands of the English dramatic tradition, Browning's poetry was taken as indicating a direction which modern poets should follow. And, later in the review, the critic implied that Browning's work on “a kind of dramatic form” prepared the reading public to respond to the works of the dramatic poets who follow – himself included. The critic was T. S. Eliot.
Browning'sThe Ring and the Book: “A Novel Country”
Authors: Blalock Susan
Published: October 2008

Henry James declared in “The Novel in The Ring and the Book” that he had long thought of the twelve-book poem as an unsuccessful novel of the “so-called historical sort.” He thought that the manner of its production “tragically spoiled” and “smothered” Browning's intention in writing his novel-in-verse. James identifies that intention as the desire to present a “study of the manners and conditions from which our own have … issued.” James's desire for the structure to build a coherent love story around Pompilia and Caponsacchi blinded him to the processive nature of Browning's study of how art represents the manners and conditions from which our own have issued. What James laments as “the great loose and uncontrolled composition” and the “great heavy-hanging cluster of related but unresolved parts” actually constitutes rather than spoils the novelistic force ofThe Ring and the Bookif we define the novel in Mikhail Bakhtin's manner as a revolutionary process rather than as a fixed generic form.
The Androgynous Body in Pater's “Winckelmann”
Authors: Dellamora Richard
Published: October 2008

The “deeply felt” quality of Walter Pater's essay on Winckelmann indicates the depth of affinity between these two men. Young Pater shared Winckelmann's religious scepticism, his intense commitment to rationality, and his absorption in the study of art. As well, both shared an erotic temperament and wrote especially for young men. Winckelmann had shown that an explicit homoeroticism might play a key role in cultural interpretation. His writing helped Pater in his effort to counter the Matthew Arnold of “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment.” Already in March 1864, when Arnold delivered this lecture at Oxford, he was reacting against the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites. At least such a reaction explains his harsh treatment of Heine as a latter-day pagan. Although only a year earlier Arnold had delivered a sympathetic and well-informed lecture on Heine, he now put him in the position of aesthete and ignored important elements of his thought. Walter Pater may well have been one of Arnold's auditors at this time (DeLaura, p. 203). If so, the occasion was prophetic because Heine's position as characterized by Arnold resembles that which Pater would take in 1867 in his second published essay, “Winckelmann” (DeLaura, p. 201). Pater realized as much, hence took steps to subvert the position that Arnold took in his lecture. He supplemented Arnold's view of Greek culture in the time of Sophocles with Winckelmann's playful and sensuous ideal of androgynous beauty in the succeeding age of Praxiteles. Pater reinterpreted Arnold's ideal of the imaginative reason in an erotic light. Arnold's negative treatment of Heine extended to the “peace” between “body and soul” that Heine had prophesied (p. 227). Pater corrected this bias in Arnold and argued instead the importance of the body as a crux of value in a contemporary ideal of culture.
The Geometry of the Modern City: G. W. M. Reynolds and The Mysteries of London
Authors: Humpherys Anne
Published: October 2008

In Book vii of The Prelude Wordsworth chronicles the months he lived in London and concludes with two images for the modern city. Following his feeling that “The face of every one / That passes by me is a mystery,” he sees a blind beggar with his life's history on a card around his neck; this is followed by the spectacle of Bartholomew's Fair. The poet's response to these experiences of urban mystery and multitudinousness is well-known:

O Blank confusion! true epitome

Of what the mighty City is herself

To thousands upon thousands of her sons

Living amid the same perpetual whirl

Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

To one identity, by differences

That have no law, no meaning, and no end -

(Book VII, 11. 722–28)
Robert Browning's “The Other Half-Rome”: A “Fancy-fit” or Not?
Authors: Finley C. Stephen
Published: October 2008

The poet – speaker of Book 1 ofThe Ring and the Bookbelieved that the first two monologues of his grand poem balanced one another. In his preview of the monologues, he writes that Half-Rome and Other Half-Rome are equally unsuccessful in their efforts to find the truth of the murder story. The speakers possess an “opposite feel” for the truth, but each achieves a “like swerve, like unsuccess” (I.883–84). Although Other Half-Rome succeeds in being on the right side of the issue, Browning as poet-speaker considers his defense of Pompilia to be the result only of luck or a “fancy-fit.” This “fancy-fit” is a mood which inclines the speaker to choose Pompilia as it might incline him to choose between two runners in a race according to the colors of their scarves (1.885–92). Browning sets this speech by a Bernini fountain, one where Triton blows water through a conch: “Puffs up steel sleet which breaks to diamond dust” (1.900). The poet may have intended this setting to suggest the way in which he views the language and imagery that Other Half-Rome uses to tell his story. The speaker's mixture of Christian and classical mythology and his concern for the painterly qualities of Pompilia's deathbed scene do suggest an aesthetic temperament. The poet may have considered the speech of such a man to be “diamond dust” signifying nothing. In any case, the poet-speaker of Book 1 concludes his description of Other Half-Rome by saying, with apparent sarcasm, that to this speaker Pompilia “seemed a saint and martyr both” (1.909). This assessment of Other Half-Rome has been the subject of disagreement among commentators on the poem.
Victorianized Romans: Images of Rome in Victorian Painting
Authors: Landow George P.
Published: October 2008

Victorian writers and artists gazed at the phenomenon that was Rome and found in it what they wanted and needed to find. Rome cast a longer shadow than did the Bible on the British upper and upper-middle classes, for whom Latin was a second language and Roman history a second past. The Bible's influence pervaded the culture of the classes below them, many of whose members had learned to read precisely in order to read the Scriptures according to evangelical interpretive and meditative practice. Since many individual members of the lower and middle classes rose in power, wealth, and social position during the Victorian period, cultural attitudes based on the Scriptures came into conflict with those based on the classical past. But for those in power, Rome and its grand, diverse, tortured, ambiguous history remained the predominant cultural example, though at times notions of chivalry and Hellenism rivaled its influence.
Breaking Out: The English Assimilation of Continental Thought in Nineteenth-Century Rome
Authors: Preyer Robert O.
Published: October 2008

Rome was central to the Anglo-American imagination; for Isabel Archer “in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective.… Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater.” James here records (in the preterit tense) an occurrence which can be recovered from the past definite and replicated in the present and future progressive tenses – Isabel needs only to position herself before the “large Roman record” and the experience of soothing Time, Time as continuum, becomes a possibility once again. This replicable consciousness may be further specified “how it feels when one is in the happening of experiencing Time as the fluid medium of all lived experience.” Rome occasions the consciousness of an alternative time sense, one which might lighten the burden of living within a deterministic temporal dimension where past actions condition present and future actions to such an extent that one feels hopelessly locked into an imprisoning narrative pattern of before and after, cause and effect. James obviously believed that such temporal epiphanies offered root room for the psyche, a possibility of returning to the actual with renewed or composed psychic energies. (Other interpretations were, of course, possible-the complacent and self-satisfied traveller was often troubled by this extension of consciousness.) However interpreted, one finds this shock of recognition everywhere – in Canto 4 of Childe Harold, in The Education of Henry Adams, in Middlemarch and Romola, The Marble Faun, in the verse of all the major poets from Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley through both Brownings, Rogers, and Tennyson, in The Stones of Venice, Dipsychus, Amours de Voyage, and dimly in Rienzi and The Last Days of Pompeii, not to mention Harriet Beecher Stowe's less-than-immortal Agnes of Sorrento.
Ruskin's Italy
Authors: Spear Jeffrey L.
Published: October 2008

In a fragmentary preface to St. Mark's Rest, now in Princeton University's Firestone Library, Ruskin gives a brief history of his Venetian experiences, emphasizing the reading that conditioned his early responses to the city that proved so important to his life and work:

My father had trained me well in Shakespeare I knew the Two Gentlemen, & the Merchants of Verona and Venice, better than any gentlemen or merchants in London. had learned most of Romeo and Juliet, by heart; and all the beautiful beginnings of Othello. From Byron though with less reverence, I had received even deeper impressions – nor can I to this day be enough thankful for the glorious ideal of Venetian womanhood and Venetian patriotism which he gave me in Faliero and the Foscari, as I became capable of receiving it in later years Add to these Rogers poems, with Turner Vignettes – and Shelleys Julian & Maddalo, Prouts drawings in the Watercolour Rooms of its Old Society and the list of my first tutors in Venetian work will be full.
Hawthorne, Sophia, and Hilda as Copyists: Duplication and Transformation in The Marble Faun
Authors: MacKay Carol Hanbery
Published: October 2008

To read closely Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun in light of its genesis is to discover a series of remarkable parallels between the author, who sometimes copied passages from his notebooks into his romance, and the character Hilda, who copies paintings. But the correlations do not end there: they extend to Sophia, Hawthorne's wife, who resembles Hilda and who carried on her own practice of selectively copying her husband's journals for publication after his death. No matter what caused him to copy in the first place, Hawthorne's manner of composing in part by copying served him as artistic and psychological motivation to develop a certain theme. In this case, Hawthorne's activity of self-borrowing while composing The Marble Faun finds reflection in its theme of copying, and the character Hilda reflects not only Sophia but Hawthorne himself. In The Marble Faun Hawthorne created a microcosm of his current obsession with the practice and implications of copying.
Giovanni Ruffini and Doctor Antonio: Italian and English Contributions to a Myth of Exile
Authors: Christensen Allan C.
Published: October 2008

When first published in 1855, Doctor Antonio immediately caught the imagination of English readers, in part because it seemed a beguilingly unusual creation. Although written by a former Italian exile, Giovanni Ruffini, it had been composed in an English that struck critics as of the purest in its evocative simplicity and fervid earnestness. And while narrating a familiar story of an English heart captivated by the beauty of Italy and its inhabitants, it told the story largely from the unaccustomed viewpoint of an Italian protagonist. This Italian also perceived a charming freshness in the English heroine's idealistic vision of his country. Perhaps the novel thereby conveyed the subtle but interesting impression that the Italy of the Englishman's romantic dreams owed as much to the imagination and desires of the English beholder as to the realities of Italy itself.
Combating an Alien Tyranny: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Evolution as a Feminist Poet
Authors: Byrd Deborah
Published: October 2008

The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential – and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. (Simone de Beauvoir xxxiv)

The name [of poet]

Is royal, and to sign it like a queen

Is what I dare not, – though some royal blood

Would seem to tingle in me now and then,

With sense of power and ache.

Aurora LeighI. (934–38)

'Tis Antidote to turn –

To Tomes of solid Witchraft –

(Emily Dickinson, #593)

“Speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence – these are the qualities that hold us enthralled” as we read Elizabeth Barrett Browning'sAurora Leigh, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1932 (1.212). As Woolf points out, these qualities emanate not so much from Aurora as from her creator, whose strong and lively presence so pervades the poem that “Again and again … Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. … [making it] impossible for the most austere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his [sic] eyes should be fixed upon the page” (212). And as Woolf observes, the “flesh” the critic touches is that of a woman who knows that the royal blood of poets flows through her veins. “Elizabeth the actual” is a subject, speaking boldly of the world as she perceives and experiences it.
“Some Interchange of Grace”: “Saul” and Sonnets From the Portuguese
Authors: Sullivan Mary Rose
Published: October 2008

That Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had an influence on each other's poetry is difficult to doubt but more difficult to prove; their similar backgrounds and shared experiences, and a reticence in both to discuss their working habits, generally make attempts to fix possible influences between them problematic at best. Two periods of their shared lives, however, do provide an unusually clear record of the way each affected and was affected by the other's writings: the first, from their introduction in January 1845 until their marriage in September 1846, during which time Browning completed the last two numbers of his Bells and Pomegranates series and Elizabeth Barrett wrote her Sonnets from the Portuguese, and the second in 1855, when Browning published Men and Women. Their courtship letters show that they considered themselves engaged in a unique poetic as well as personal partnership, and their poetry of this time, together with Browning's 1855 volume, reveals that their creative interaction was more extensive than even they realized. Of particular note is the way that Browning's first version of “Saul” helped to shape the theme and imagery of Sonnets from the Portuguese, which in turn influenced his later conclusion to “Saul.”
“Uproar in the Echo”: Browning's Vitalist Beginnings
Authors: White Leslie
Published: October 2008

In letters to Mrs. Ernest Benzon and Mrs. Thomas FitzGerald, Browning claims affinity with the great philosopher of the Will, Schopenhauer, and asserts that elements of vitalism are the “substratum” of his life and work. These letters confirm the poet's place in the line of vitalist thought shaped by Schopenhauer, the English Romantics, and Carlyle and further developed by Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, Henri Bergson, and D. H. Lawrence. Vitalism resists precise definition; each theorist advances a singular terminology and application. Schopenhauer's vitalism may be understood from his concept of cosmic Will; Carlyle's from the essential presence of energy, movement, and change in the world. Bergson used the term élan vital and Lawrence such characteristically vague phrases as “sense of truth” and “supreme impulse” to express faith in forces operating beneath or hovering above the surface of life. Broadly put, when a rational orientation to the world ceased to be adequate, when rationalism devolved into a falsification of reality's authentic energy, major vitalists came into existence and posited as the true reality a primitive, universal force of which everything in that reality is an objectification. Unlike other vitalists in the English tradition, such as Blake and Lawrence, Browning was not comfortable with cosmic images. His vitalism breaks from the main line to focus on the individual human will, which he saw as an intuitive impulse and as a means to realize the self and locate its place in the world. For Browning, the comprehension of life's vital movement lay in the dynamic energy of willed action.
Speaker, Listener, and Overhearer: The Reader in the Dramatic Poem
Authors: Maynard John
Published: October 2008

Robert Browning's poetry showed a special resistance to the text-oriented, aestheticizing tendencies of the New Criticism. It was easy, almost too easy, to find ways to talk about the speaker and his tone of voice; but difficulties arose the moment one tried to move from these statements, as one would in a poem by Keats or Frost, to statements about the poem. Something about the nature of the dramatic monologue itself seems to have been especially unreceptive to organic, unifying conceptions of art. It is not surprising that Roma King's broadly New Critical,The Bow and the Lyre, should have received acclaim at the time for (among other qualities) reading the unifying images in Browning's poems. But the work from that period that has had staying power, Robert Langbaum'sThe Poetry of Experience, is one that hardly fit the critical temper of the time. In retrospect, we may say that its power derived especially from its refusal to let New Critical dogmas circumscribe the kinds of critical approaches applied to the odd form of the dramatic monologue. Langbaum's concept of experience was (is) attractive; his historical stories of the relation between Romanticism, nineteenth-century preference in drama for character over action, and the dramatic monologue were extremely interesting ones. But what was and remains most influential was a strategy for approaching the dramatic monologue, the famous one in which the poem commands a balance of judgment and sympathy. Langbaum's readings of the Duke and the rest have been much debated and often battered. The terms he laid down for the debate have proved hearty and persistent.
Art, Artist, and Audience in “A Toccata of Galuppi's”
Authors: Turner W. Craig
Published: October 2008

Robert Browning's music poem “A Toccata of Galuppi's” is built on a system of telescoping viewpoints that might best be diagrammed as concentric circles with Galuppi's music at the core. The speaker of this monologue, a type of smug nineteenth-century Englishman with a deep interest in science, uses the occasion of Galuppi's clavichord touch-piece to muse on possible reactions of the composer's eighteenth-century Venetian audience. As he does so, the speaker becomes something of an artist or creator himself, using his own imagination to recreate an evening at an eighteenth-century Venetian ball; but the speaker also is a critic, himself responding to and interpreting not only Galuppi's music but also the Venetians in their imagined responses to the music. In this best of all Browning's music poems, he has given us something of an analogue of his own method as artist and moralist, as well as an ironic understanding of the efficacy of art and its ongoing treatment by critical audiences.
Art, Mortality, and the Drama of Subjective Responses in “A Toccata of Galuppi's”
Authors: Schweik Robert C.
Published: October 2008

Exegi monumentum aere perennius.… non omnis moriar. From Horace onward, the relationship of art to human mortality has been a major theme in literature – and one which obviously interested Browning, if we may judge from some striking variations he worked on it. In “Cleon” and “Abt Vogler,” for example, his speakers address the subject from very different points of view: Cleon, the pagan, argues that the fact his art will survive after his death cannot in any meaningful way confer immortality on him and that, as an artist, he even more than others is painfully aware of his own limited life; Abt Vogler, on the other hand, confident of the changelessness of God's good, sees in his art a promise that both he and his improvisation will endure. Given Browning's penchant for pushing ideas to extremes and turning them in unusual directions, it is not surprising that he would treat the topic in other less predictable ways – as he did, for example, by making the inert changelessness of works of art in “The Statue and the Bust” comment ironically on human failure to act, or by endowing the worldly and sensuous Bishop at St. Praxed's with an appropriately literal faith in the kind of immortality a suitably artful tomb would confer upon him. It is not surprising, then, that similar topics would appear in “A Toccata of Galuppi's.”