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By Gregory Tate

This year marked the bicentenary of the birth of the Victorian poet Robert Browning in 1812, although this news might come as something of a surprise. The bicentenary of Browning’s contemporary Charles Dickens was celebrated with so many exhibitions, festivals, and other events that an official Dickens 2012 group was set up to co-ordinate and keep track of them all. The writings of Alfred Tennyson, Browning’s (consistently more popular) rival, also cropped up in some high-profile places throughout the year. But although academic specialists and other Browning enthusiasts organised conferences and special publications in 2012, media commentators and cultural institutions remained almost wholly silent about the Browning anniversary.

There are many possible reasons for this silence. There’s the issue of religion: Browning’s robust Christian faith, and his love of abstruse theological speculation, are perhaps less congenial to twenty-first-century tastes than the yearning doubt of Tennyson or the pious sentimentality of Dickens. Browning’s habit of writing poems about arcane subjects (such as the thirteenth-century troubadour Sordello or the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus) might also alienate readers. The reason might, however, be something even more fundamental: Browning’s poetry is difficult, and discomfiting, to read. When Browning was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey on 31 December 1889, Henry James wrote that “a good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey; but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd.” For James, Browning’s oddness was an essential part of his poetic achievement. Today, it seems, the general view (if there is a general view on him at all) is that his oddness precludes greatness.

For most of his life, Browning’s oddness was seen by his Victorian contemporaries as the key characteristic of his writing. John Ruskin, for example, wrote to the poet in 1855 to describe the poems in his new book Men and Women as “absolutely and literally a set of the most amazing Conundrums that ever were proposed to me.” Browning’s reply to Ruskin is significant, because it suggests that his difficult style is central to the goals of his poetry: “I know that I don’t make out my conception by my language; all poetry being a putting the infinite within the finite.” This definition of poetry was closely tied to Browning’s views on psychology: throughout his career he was preoccupied with the question of how to fit what he saw as the infinite capacities of the human mind into the finite media of language and poetic form. His answer was to adopt a knotty, convoluted, and tortuous syntax which articulated the difficulty, but also the necessity, of conveying the workings of the mind through the more or less inadequate tools of language.

Browning’s approach is exemplified in what is arguably his greatest poem, The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), a psychological epic which recounts the events of a seventeenth-century murder case from nine different perspectives. Browning sets out to integrate these conflicting perspectives into an authoritative and morally educational account of the murder, describing them as:

The variance now, the eventual unity,
Which make the miracle. See it for yourselves,
This man’s act, changeable because alive!
Action now shrouds, now shows the informing thought.

The poem’s concern is not with the murder itself, “this man’s act”, but with tracing “the informing thought,” the motive behind the act. This poetic analysis of thought, Browning argues, enables the synthesis of conflicting accounts into an “eventual unity,” and the dense style of his verse is a key element of this process. “Art,” he states “may tell a truth / Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought.” By testing and confounding his readers, Browning’s difficult (and odd) poetry invites them to think carefully about the minds of other people, breeding new thoughts and telling oblique truths.

In The Ring and the Book Browning addresses the “British Public, ye who like me not.” The publication of this poem, however, marked a sea change in Victorian opinions of the poet. In the 1870s and 1880s his writing was admired simultaneously for its evident Christianity and its intellectual richness, and he was venerated as a sage and a moral teacher by the Browning Society which was founded in 1881 to study and champion his work. He was also celebrated, by Henry James and by Modernists such as Ezra Pound, as (in James’s words) “a tremendous and incomparable modern.” In 2012, though, Browning’s modernity and relevance have not been sufficiently emphasised. This is a shame, because, in his psychological sophistication and in his awareness of the complexities and limitations of language, he still has truths to tell to the British public, who like him not. Those truths, and Browning’s poems, might be oblique and difficult, but they’re worth the effort.

Gregory Tate is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. His book, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870,  was published by OUP in November 2012. You can follow him on Twitter @drgregorytate.

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Image credit: Robert Browning. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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This Saturday is Ezra Pound’s 125th birthday, so we’ve decided to run an excerpt from Professor A. David Moody’s biography of the poet in his honor.

The Cantos, Ezra Pound’s ambitious, though incomplete, long poem, can at first seem unintelligible and chaotic, a sprawling mess of Latin and Greek, Confucius and Kublai Khan and the Russian Revolution. Yet according to Moody, Pound was inspired, also, by the more traditional structure and form of long poems by earlier poets. In the following selection from Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work (Volume I), Moody discusses the beginnings of Pound’s epic – and how Pound reconciled the influences of Dante and Robert Browning with the frenzied tenor of the modern world.     –Hanna Oldsman, Publicity Intern

[Pound] was going back to his old master not so much to learn as to argue with him and assert his independence. He was taking Browning’s Sordello as a point of departure for his cantos, as ‘the thing to go on from’. He had to start there because he thought it ‘the best long poem in English since Chaucer’, and the only one with a ‘live form’. But that form was not right for what he had to do, and he would be finding his own in breaking free from Browning’s.

He first began to mention being at work on his long poem in the summer of 1915. ‘It is a huge, I was going to say, gamble, but shan’t’, he told Alice Corbin Henderson in early August; and in September he told Milton Bronner that it was ‘a cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore.’ His Scriptor Ignotus, back in 1906, had likewise predicted that the great epic would take just so long to write. He told his father in mid-December that his mind was then ‘in the Vth canto’, but the surviving drafts show that he was still casting about for a form at that date, and it was a full year before he had the first three trial cantos in any sort of shape. [….]

His materials could be endless, immeasurable, but he hardly knew how to put them in order. He had any amount of the past and the present to sort through, and, since he chose to examine it without preconception, it presented itself to him as a vast heap of random records and anecdotes. The best he could do at first was set about abbreviating some of those, and he produced a litter of fragmentary drafts, some of them in typescript. In one of these, headed ‘Fragment / Modern World’, the valet of Ser D’Alviano gossips about what his master was saying about writers and their books in 1520. In another, numbered ‘[page] 102’ and headed ‘Foot Note. A toss-up’, Pound’s visit to the great Provençal scholar Emil Levy in Freiburg is woven into the tale of de Maensac. A sequence of six or seven pages tries out ways to envision paradise, as by seeing points of colour, making stars of them and then making each star ‘a nest of noble voices’. Bits of all those drafts, and others, will turn up in ‘Canto V’, though the visit to ‘old Levy’ will go into

by Cassie, Publicity

I don’t know about y’all, but this week has been very, very long for me. Luckily, it’s almost over! Hopefully these links will help you get through the rest of Friday. If not, well, you have more problems than I can help you with.

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So, yesterday's poetry post gave you a two-for-the-price-of-one sort of deal, with "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe and "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" by Sir Walter Raleigh. Rather than seizing on the idea of poetic conversation, I decided to go back to the poems and look at what they're talking about: passionate love, and whether or not it can be trusted. And that notion of theme put me in mind of a dark, dark tale in the form of a poetic monologue penned by Robert Browning.

Porphyria's Lover
by Robert Browning

The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me — she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

Analysis: The poem is 60 lines long, and is written as a single, long stanza although it is, in fact, 12 5-line stanzas if one judges by the rhyme scheme: ABABB CDCDD (etc.) The poem is written in iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet per line: taDUM taDUM taDUM taDUM), and it is a first-person narrative sharing a horrific story, indeed.

The speaker, who is madly in love with Porphyria, tells the tale of a rainy night, when his lady love came to his cottage, kindled his fire (actual and otherwise), then told him she loved him. Realizing that he does not actually deserve her (due to financial inequities - she comes from money, you see, and he lives in a cottage, and therefore does not), and perhaps concerned that the world will intervene, the speaker throttles Porphyria with her own hair, then sits there, embracing her, for quite some time later.

This poem was written just before the start of Queen Victoria's rule, as societal standards were shifting towards repressiveness (and particularly towards repression with respect to female sexuality) but not in the heydey of Victorian principles, which didn't occur until much later in the century. Porphyria is the disease which is believed to have caused the madness of King George III and of Vincent Van Gogh — symptoms include hallucination, paranoia, depression and more — and yet, Browning would have known none of that when he crafted his poem about a man in love with with a woman named Porphyria, which manages to equate love and madness.

As with Browning's later poem, "My Last Duchess", about which I put up a pretty great post once, if I do say so myself, one might question where Browning's thoughts lay on the matter of sexual repression in general, and fear of feminine sexuality in particular. I don't know the answer, but it's pretty clear that this poem, like "My Last Duchess", is intensely psychological. Where "My Last Duchess" depicts the Duke's efforts to control his wife and what can be viewed as her sexual conduct (or, if the Duke is to be believed — and it seems as if he is not — her sexual misconduct), even if only smiles and blushes are mentioned, "Porphyria's Lover" tackles similar themes of feeling threatened by a woman and trying to control her. The speaker in this poem is threatened by her position in society, perhaps, or maybe he's just operating out of a place of personal insecurity; his strangulation of his beloved to ensure her "eternal love" is decidedly controlling (in a crazy-ass way, but still).

I should note that some folks hold the theory that Porphyria is not actually dead, but has merely participated in erotic asphyxiation; that particular interpretation makes the poem kinky instead of creepy, but my money's on creepy, particularly in light of the later poem, "My Last Duchess", which definitely involved craziness and murder.