Claim: Robert Browning had mastery of epic poetry.

Robert Browning -LRB- 7 May 1812 -- 12 December 1889 -RRB- was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets . His poems are known for their irony , characterization , dark humour , social commentary , historical settings , and challenging vocabulary and syntax .   Browning 's early career began promisingly , but was not a success . The long poem Pauline brought him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and was followed by Paracelsus , which was praised by William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens , but in 1840 the difficult Sordello , which was seen as wilfully obscure , brought his poetry into disrepute . His reputation took more than a decade to recover , during which time he moved away from the Shelleyan forms of his early period and developed a more personal style .   In 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett , who at the time was considerably better known than himself . So started one of history 's most famous literary marriages . They went to live in Italy , a country he called `` my university '' , and which features frequently in his work . By the time of her death in 1861 , he had published the crucial collection Men and Women . The collection Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed , and made him a leading British poet . He continued to write prolifically , but his reputation today rests largely on the poetry he wrote in this middle period .   When Browning died in 1889 , he was regarded as a sage and philosopher-poet who through his writing had made contributions to Victorian social and political discourse -- as in the poem Caliban upon Setebos , which some critics have seen as a comment on the theory of evolution , which had recently been put forward by Darwin and others . Unusually for a poet , societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive . Such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century .   Browning 's admirers have tended to temper their praise with reservations about the length and difficulty of his most ambitious poems , particularly The Ring and the Book . Nevertheless , they have included such eminent writers as Henry James , Oscar Wilde , George Bernard Shaw , G. K. Chesterton , Ezra Pound , Jorge Luis Borges , and Vladimir Nabokov . Among living writers , Stephen King 's The Dark Tower series and A.S. Byatt 's Possession refer directly to Browning 's work .   Today Browning 's critically most esteemed poems include the monologues Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came , Fra Lippo Lippi , Andrea Del Sarto , and My Last Duchess . His most popular poems include Porphyria 's Lover , How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix , the diptych Meeting at Night , the patriotic Home Thoughts from Abroad , and the children 's poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin . His abortive dinner-party recital of How They Brought The Good News was recorded on an Edison wax cylinder , and is believed to be the oldest surviving recording made in the United Kingdom of a notable person .