Lyric and Anti-Lyric Forms: A Method For Judging Browning
- Lyric and Anti-Lyric FormsA Method For Judging Browning
William Cadbury
Assistant Professor of English, University of Oregon
NOTES
1. As will become apparent, this paper is in part an attempt to bypass the perpetual argument about the nature of the dramatic monologue, by creating a terminology which will subsume the dramatic monologue and allow us to go on to other matters than its definition. For the history of the argument, see the second chapter of Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York, 1957), and the fourth chapter of Park Honan, Browning’s Characters (New Haven, 1961), in part a refutation of Langbaum.
2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), 250, 272; Paul Goodman, The Structure of Literature (Chicago, 1954; reprinted in Phoenix edition, 1962, used here), 184, 216, 272.
3. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), 155–8; Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston, 1957; reprinted in Vintage edition, New York, 1962), 201–3.
4. Park Honan reads Caliban as designed exclusively to differ from ourselves (146–7, 252). It seems to me that the greatness of the poem lies in the care with which Browning makes Caliban almost a mirror to us, to even the best in us, yet hedges the similarity with one difference, an overwhelming brutality.
5. Thomas J. Assad, “Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess,’” Tulane Studies in English, X (1960), 117–28. B. R. Jerman, “Browning’s Witless Duke,” PMLA, LXXII (1957), 488–93, takes what I think is an equally mistaken view, and is corrected by Laurence Perrine, “Browning’s Shrewd Duke,” PMLA, LXXIV (1959), 157–9.
6. This phase of comedy is described in Anatomy, 180.
7. Among the few recent discussions of “Gismond,” we may single out Ina Beth Sessions, “The Dramatic Monologue,” PMLA, LXII (1947), 503–16, especially 510–11. E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (Princeton, 1952), 92–3, sees no possible ambiguities in Gismond’s lady.
8. Our response must be, in the realm of character, what our response to tragedy must be in the realm of plot; in tragedy, Goodman tells us with the aid of Aristotle, hidden and apparent plots are plaited to make a single plot composed of elements which may be separated in the process of analysis but not in the experience of the work (28). So here, except that the unity composed is of character, not plot.
9. Roma A. King, Jr., The Bow and the Lyre (Ann Arbor, 1957), 56, sees the Bishop as largely contemptible, and so disagrees with Honan (134), with F. L. Lucas, Eight Victorian Poets (Cambridge, 1930), 29, and with me.
10. Curtis Dahl points out that Roland, “like the grammarian…triumphs over his wasteland.” “The Victorian Wasteland,” in Austin Wright, Victorian Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1961), 35.
11. For a reading opposed to mine, see E. D. H. Johnson, 95, and for readings with which I largely agree, see Langbaum, 192–200, and J. M. Cohen, Robert Browning, Men and Books (London, 1952), 82. R. E. Hughes, “Browning’s Childe Roland and the Broken Taboo,” Literature and Psychology, IX (1959), 18–19, is a strictly Freudian reading.
12. My claim that Roland does not understand the river does not deny the validity of J. H. Buckley’s claim that Browning here draws on typical symbolism of death by water and subsequent baptism, seen also in “Karshish.” The Victorian Temper (London, 1952), 102.
13. David Erdman, “Browning’s Industrial Nightmare,” PQ, XXXVI (1957), 417–35, takes “the engine…fit to reel/Men’s bodies out like silk” to be “rusted industrial equipment” (423), in keeping with his thesis. The image contains mediaeval and modern brutalities, but I think it is stretching a point to relegate the mediaeval to the background—it is a device for torture, not a part of a factory, that Roland sees.
14. All quotations from Browning are cited by parenthetical line numbers, and are from Poems of Robert Browning, ed. Donald Smalley, Riverside ed. (Boston, 1956).
15. For an argument directly opposed to my implications on the playlet...
