Robert Browning

His Poems and Works

His first work of any importance is Pauline (1833) an introspective poem which shows very strongly the influence of Shelley, whom, at this period Browning held in great reverence.

Paracelsus (1835), the story of the hero's unquenchable thirst for that breadth of knowledge which is beyond the grasp of one man, brings to the fore Browning's predominant ideas - that a life without love must be a failure, and that God is working all things to an end beyond human divining.

Then Browning wrote a number of six plays, but he lacks the fundamental qualities of a dramatist. His amazingly subtle analysis of character and motive is not adequate for true drama, because he cannot reveal character in action. His method is to take a character at a moment of crisis and, by allowing him to talk, to reveal not only his present thoughts and feelings, but also his past history.

The volumes Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) show this faculty being directed into the channel in which it was to achieve perfection - that of the dramatic monologue. Now, at the height of his powers, Browning produced some of his best work in Men and Women (1855) which consists almost entirely of dramatic monologues. Here are to be found the famous Fra Lippo Lippi, An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician, Andrea del Sarto, Cleon. Most of them are written in blank verse. The year 1864 saw the publication of his last really great volume, Dramatic Personae, again a collection of dramatic monologues.

In style, these poems have much of the rugged, elliptical quality, which was on occasion the poet's downfall, but here it is used with a skill and a power, which show him at the very pinnacle of his achievement.

Features of his work

a)     His choice of subject

Browning's themes divide themselves broadly into three groups: philosophical or religious, love, and lighter themes as in the Pied Piper of Hamelin. His philosophical poems, on which his reputation rested in his own day, all bear on his central belifs that life must never be a striving for something beyond one reach, and that it is "God's task to make the heavenly period perfect the earthen." The obvious optimism of "What I aspired to be / And was not, conforts me ", has been resented by more modern critics as a facile shirking of life's complexities. His love poems are perhaps his greatest achievement. They have a calm authenticity of tone.

Always, his first concern was with the human soul. He was particularly interested in abnormal people, and was able to project himself into their minds and to lay bare their feelings and motives. Yet his characters are not often completely objective, because so many of them are mouthpieces for his own philosophy.

He shows a fondness, too, for out-of-the-way historical settings and for foreign scenes, which at his best, as in The Bishop Orders His Tomb are recreated with a vivid accuracy. Along with this interest in the unusual goes an obvious relish for the grotesque and macabre, which is seen at its most striking in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

b)  His style

Analiza: Tesuturile - tesutul epitelial, tesutul conjunctiv, tesutul nervos Eseu: Structura genomului la procariote

Browning's style has been the subject of endless discussion, for it presents a fascinating problem. At his worst, his poems are a series of bewildering mental acrobatics, expressed in  a willfully harsh rhythm vocabulary. At his best he can achieve a noble dignity, and a verbal music as good as anything produced by that master of melody, Tennyson. Above all, his verse reflects the abundant vitality of his charater. He is a master of surprising variety of metrical forms and excels in the manipulation of rhythmic effects.

In his greatest work even the notorious rugged angularity of his phrasing and vocabulary is turned to account and produces a beautiful peculiarly of its own.

c)      His Descriptive Power

In this respect Browning differs widely from Tennyson who slowly creates a lovely image by careful misssing of detail. Browning cares less for beauty of description for its own sake. In most of his work it is found only in flashes, where he paints the background of his story in a few dashing strokes, or crystallizes his meaning in an image whose beauty staggers us. He is fond of striking primary colours which startle by their very vividness, and as a painting of movement he has few equals. (Caliban upon Setebos: "You other sleekweek . and says a plain word . " and Cleon: "Cleon the poet . Thy lip hath . " ; the passages show two very different exemples of his descriptive skill).

The Dramatic Monologue

Characteristics

Another form of the lyric, the dramatic monologue, was brought to great heights by the Victorian poet Robert Browning. As the title suggest, it is a poem told by one speaker about a significant event. Several qualities exist in the form:

1. The speaker reveals in his/her own words some dramatic situation in which he/she is involved.

2. The speaker demonstrates his/her character through the poem.

3. The speaker addresses a listener who does not engage in dialogue but helps to develop the speech.

We enter the psyche of the speaker, and the skilful poet makes much of his/her own nature, attitudes, and circumstances available in words to the reader who discerns the implications of the poem.

The dramatic monologue differs from a soliloquy in a play in that, in drama, time and place are developed before the character ascends the stage alone to make his/her remarks, whereas the dramatic monologue by itself establishes time, place, and character. 

Fra Lippo Lippi

A dramatic monologue in blank verse, is one of the poems, which displays Browning's immersion in the civilisation of the Renaissance. Browning establishes the atmosphere of his poem by placing his speaker, the Florentine painter and monk, Filippo Lippi, on the pavement outside the Medici-Riccardi's palace, having him refer to the altarpiece he is painting for Cosimo de Medici, to the churches of the Carmine and San Lorenzo and to numerous intimate features of the life of the time. Browning drew most of his material for his poem from the account of  Fra Lippo in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters, but his person is quite different both from Vasari's portrait and from the historical figure. As Brownings's Fra Lippo speaks to the watchmen who have intercepted him on his return from a night of revelry in disreputable company, he exhibits a character largely invented by the poet himself and his philosophy of art echoes Browning's views. Browning places Fra Lippo as a realist who diverged from the religious idealism of the earlier painters, very much as Browning's poetry diverged from Romantic and Victorian conventions.

In explaining himself to the watchmen, Fra Lippo shows that he is an earthy, honest fellow, whose attraction to the pleasures of the flesh is part of a general delight with the world that leads him to depict it realistically in his painting. His joy is so irrepressible that he occasionally interrupts himself to sing folk songs. His account of the orphaned childhood, which led him to become a keen observer, and of his first paintings, which portrayed the scenes and people of the neighbourhood, is full of remarkable particulars that convey vivid glimpses of life in Renaissance Florence. The monk begins by admitting that his escapades are due to weakness of will, but this gradually changes to a move of self-justification as he express his real views. The church authorities have criticized his paintings because they do not express religious feeling, saying that they represent a decline from the work of Fra Angelico and Lorenzo Monaco. But Fra Lippo defends his realism by declaring that taking pleasure in the visible world is a way of worshipping the God who made it. He says his escapades are a form of protest against hypocritical prohibitions, against taking life as it is, and that it is the painter's mission to call attention to sights that others overlook: "Art was given for that: / God uses us to help each other so . "

Nevertheless, Fra Lippo is reluctant to flout authority, feels that he has said too much, promises to "make amends" for his faults by painting a picture for the nuns of a nearby church, and closes his monologue by imagining that if he should appear in the company of virtous people, he will be defended by the pretty girl who has modeled the figure of Saint Lucy in his painting. The picture he plans to paint is Lippi's "Coronation of the Virgin" which is described in some details, not all of it accurate. Browning saw it in Florence, but it is also emphasized in an account of Lippi's life in Fillippo Baldinucci's Notizie de Professori del Disegno, one of Browning's sources of inspiration about painters.

In this poem Browning has presented a remarkably vivid portrait of a vigurous, independent personality whose convinctions about life's values compel him to challenge the discipline of the church. On one level, the conflict is an opposition of principle between individual liberty and institutional conformity, but on another, it is simply a case in which a man has been forced into an unsuitable role in life. As Fra Lippo says: " Jon should not take a fellow eight year old/ And make him swear to never kiss the girls".