“Let the rank tongue blossom”: Browning’s Stuttering

“It is no longer the character who stutters in speech; it is the writer who becomes a stutterer in language. He makes language as such stutter: an affective and intensive language, and no longer an affectation of the one who speaks.”

(Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered”)¹

Robert Browning’s early poetry—from Paracelsus (1835) to the first volume of Bells and Pomegranates (1841)—famously proved as divisive as any in the history of English verse. And yet, one peculiar reaction to it united admirers and dissenters alike: that Browning was, in some special way, a chronic stutterer. Wildly divergent periods and temperaments espouse the same view so consistently that it becomes almost uncanny: that Browning “stammered” or “stuttered” was apparently as plain to his detractors as it was to his hagiographers, to licensed critics and rival poets, to contemporaries and successors.

It is perhaps unsurprising that this diagnostic consensus rapidly tips over into dispute as to its meaning. Walter Besant’s judgment of Pippa Passes remains notorious enough to feature in the Wikipedia entry on the poem (where we also learn of a small town in Kentucky named in honor of Browning’s work).² “Was there ever,” asked With Harp and Crown, “such a stuttering collocation of syllables to confound the reader and utterly destroy a sweet little lyric?” That question is naturally rhetorical, for here is

A poem which—if its author had only for once been able to wed melodious verse to the sweetest poetical thought; if he had only tried, just for once, to write lines which should not make the cheeks of those that read them to ache, the front teeth of those who declaim them to splinter and fly, the ears of those that hear them to crack—would have been a thing to rest himself upon for ever, and receive the applause of the world. To the gods it seemed otherwise. Browning, who might have led us like Hamelin the piper, has chosen the worse part. He will be so deeply wise that he cannot express his thought; he will be so full of profundities that he requires a million of lines [sic] to express them in; he will leave music and melody to Swinburne; he will leave grace and sweetness to Tennyson; and in fifty years’ time, who will read Browning?³

One wonders what, stripped of its “collocation of syllables,” would have remained to persuade Besant that “The year’s at the spring” (to which he here refers) was indeed “a sweet little lyric.”

Such digestive problems are hardly restricted to eminent Victorians. In his essay commemorating the centenary of Browning’s birth, Rupert Brooke noted that “[h]is ideas were new, for poetry—and for that reason people at first thought them obscure—but they were quite clear. Only he had as it were a stutter in his utterance.”⁴ (It is of interest here that Brooke’s formulation, whether through accident or design, itself takes on the attributes it describes, where “as it were” forms a hitch before the main clause, and that main cause (“stuttering”) itself vocally corrupts “utterance.”) A figure as temperamentally distinct from Brooke as Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, had occasion to remark, memorably, that “if Shakespeare could sing through myriad lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths.”⁵ In a less trenchant but nonetheless striking manner, James Douglas’s 1903 biography stumbles awkwardly between bemused reverence and unformulated moral censure:

Probably his obscurity is due to the fact that he was struggling to express himself in a form antagonistic to his temperament. In prose “Sordello” might have been pellucid, and “Paracelsus” clear. The sense of strain is present in all his work. His poetry is a determined stammer. The irony of his vogue lies in the passionate love which his admirers cultivated for his brilliant stuttering. Browningism was really a disease. Men and women took his poetry as a Chinaman takes opium. He was the fashionable drug of the nineteenth century.⁶

In the mechanical repetition of a term for which no explication is forthcoming, these aggregated instances might be seen...