The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life (review)

Notwithstanding Robert Browning's notorious resistance to intrusions on his private life, biographers have not been deterred. Already this century five books on his life, or aspects of it, have appeared: by Sarah Wood (2001), Mary Sanders Pollock (2003), Iain Finlayson (2004), Pamela Neville-Sington (2004), and most recently Richard Kennedy and Donald Hair (2007). The methodological sophistication of these studies varies enormously, and while three (Pollock, Finlayson, Neville-Sington) focus on the usual items that promote interested speculation (Robert's relationship with Elizabeth, public and private dualities, his friendships with women), the other two (Wood, Kennedy and Hair) are subtitled "A Literary Life" and attend more to events as they relate to his career as poet. These two may still go further than Browning would wish, but he at least might have approved the effort.

Kennedy and Hair's work provides a thoroughly researched, scrupulous, and comprehensive record. Its encyclopaedic detail, breadth of scholarship, attention to political contexts, fluent writing, and elegant bibliographical presentation certainly make it the best and most informative of the recent biographies. Its overall aim of acknowledging Ezra Pound's Browning, "Old Hippety-Hop o' the accents," is laudable. However, for many of us, even if life events were to show a heart indeed as "big as the bowels of Vesuvius," they would not explain either the poet or the poetry, and as a record of Browning's literary life the book is uneven. The stated focus is on his "dramatic imagination," but it only starts to deal persuasively with that topic when Hair takes over in chapter 27 to complete the project after Kennedy's death. Before then the "dramatic" is conceived simplistically in stage terms as words "written for performance by a single actor" (87) and as utterances of persons who are not the author (the definition provided by Browning himself). This is just prosopopoeia writ large, and when is anyone's self-description more than a tautology? The result is that "Johannes Agricola" (1836) is described as containing "no action," as a mind that "merely roams idly" (2). And Kennedy's central literary proposal, that Browning's poetry should be approached as serial variations on a species of monodrama, divided among soliloquies, dramatic narratives, dramatic monologues, and dramatic lyrics, is not new. Ralph Rader divided Browning's monologues into expressive lyrics, dramatic lyrics, dramatic monologues, and mask lyrics in 1976, and a year later Alan Sinfield outlined a continuum of monologues from confession to the drama of simulated character. Readings are straightforward, although there is the occasional exception, such as for "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (1855), where the straightforwardness is deceptive, making profoundly good sense of an enigmatic poem that is fundamentally about making sense. Otherwise, the biographical narrative is related to all the usual features about Browning from the critical orthodoxy of the mid-twentieth century (imperfection, love is best, the eternal moment, the incarnation, the need for action).

Hair transforms all this. For the last 130 pages, the author of Robert Browning's Language (1999) makes good use of that earlier work, transferring its tenets and terms to the more extended context of Browning's life. He stresses the poet as a splendid rhymester and metrical virtuoso, and always attends to the deployment of tropes and devices ("Troping is the central and defining act of the poet" [346]). This is fine formalist criticism, applied appropriately to the context of ongoing creativity. Hair understands that the dramatic may be dialectical, he observes Browning's interest in nation and nationalism, and he reminds us about the evidence (both what underpins interpretation, for example of the Lady Ashburton affair, and what might in the future be available, for example in the Armstrong Browning Library). Hair's attention to Browning as a poet inspired by printed texts as much as by the natural and the social explains a son who grew up...