Posted on 05/07/2012 8:53:04 PM PDT by Borges
It's Robert Browning's misfortune to be more often remembered as material for jokes or as the victim of humiliation than as the author of Men and Women, Dramatis Personae and The Ring and the Book. There's Oscar Wilde's gag that "Meredith was a prose Browning, and so was Browning". Or Jane Carlyle's uncertainty, after having read the lengthy, obscure narrative poem Sordello, as to whether Sordello was "a man, a city, or a book".
Has any other leading author been so regular an object of mockery? Even Henry James could not resist it, reporting after a reading by the poet that it was comforting that "if you don't understand [his poems], he himself apparently understands them even less". Max Beerbohm sent him up in a story and a cartoon, the first about a mutually uncomprehending encounter with Ibsen, the second showing him uncomfortable amid his worshippers, a prisoner of the Browningites.
Punch lampooned him as inescapably a Victorian gentleman, but living out a fantasy of being Italian. In Flush, Virginia Woolf's biography of the dog that belonged to his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, his most memorable appearance involves being bitten by the protagonist. This tradition may partly explain why the bicentenary of Browning's birth, which falls on 7 May, is being marked in so muted a fashion – even a ceremony honouring him at Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner is not taking place until December, as if fans are sulking at the extent to which his big year has been overshadowed by the Charles Dickens celebrations that began last autumn and are still continuing.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
I don’t know about all these controversies, I just LOVE Robert Browning.
I think he is the most masculine of all poets.
Happy Birthday Mr. Browning.
I revere one of his relatives, John Moses Browning.
Showing my ignorance about poetry (yet again) but I had never heard of this gentleman before tonight. Back in high school we only covered the usual suspects: Ogden Nash, Jabberwocky, and some annoying poem about eating a plum or something (can’t remember who or what). In college, I limited my work in the English department to the two required composition courses.
Still, the brief look I’ve taken of him looks promising. I may have to find some of his stuff online and check it out.
If you like the Brownings, I can recommend a movie about Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)
I like some of his poems, which is all I ask of any poet, and more than most achieve. I can’t say that I’d want to participate in a “celebration” of his bicentenary, though. A quiet acknowledgment would be more fitting from me, and that’s what I’m giving him in this post.
And, oh, so beautiful, my love! I wish I had it!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.