Robert Browning

The year 2011 brings an exciting range of high-quality work on Browning, including an accomplished literary study by Britta Martens covering Browning’s full career, an important book chapter by Charles LaPorte on Browning and the higher criticism, and a number of substantial articles. Themes that emerge in the latter include Browning and aesthetics; Browning’s hermeneutics, especially in the context of Victorian religious discourse and historiography; issues related to literary style and formal patterns in the work; and ways in which concepts of individual and institutional ethics and power intersect in Browning’s writing. We also see scholars making more extended use of Browning’s correspondence as a means of exploring his intellectual interests and the manner in which broader Victorian cultural concerns, from religion to aesthetics, transect his writing.

In Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy (Ashgate 2011) Britta Martens takes on the subject of Browning’s ongoing negotiation of his relationship to Romantic predecessors and discourses by tracing what she terms “the personal voice” from the juvenilia to the later poems. She identifies a conflict between the objective and subjective in Browning’s work and links this to the poet’s complicated relationship to his Romantic literary heritage. Martens isolates a particular group of works in the poet’s oeuvre, spanning the full career, that she terms poems written “in propria persona.” She engages with critical work on the dramatic monologue in making the case that in poems in propria persona, Browning either “either attempts a transformation of his audience’s taste and expectations, in the hope of transforming his status and literary reputation, or he seeks a self-transformation through self-reflection which helps to (re)define his poetic identity” (p. 16). She also argues that these works “display the same concern with the self-conscious exploration of the poet’s own creativity as Romantic introspective poems, but combine this with the distanced, critical scrutiny of the speaker’s motivations and limitations from the dramatic monologue” (p. 255). Browning “is less interested in historical appreciation than in the pervasive influence of Romantic poetics on his own time” (p. 22). This influence is “the key point of reference for his self-definition and the main element of Victorian poetics with which he takes issue” (p. 22). Martens uses her analysis to argue that the question of literary influence is more complex than Bloom’s antagonistic model implies (p. 21) and that Browning’s use of the dramatic monologue “constitutes an ironic undermining of the Romantic tradition” (p. 9). She is also interested in what she sees as Browning’s movement “away from author-centred aesthetics” and the parallel between this tendency and current theoretical approaches that challenge the authority of the author.

Martens’ study is divided into six chapters. In “Youthful Romanticism Reviewed” (chap. 1) and “Beyond the Romantic Long Poem: Sordello” (chap. 2), Martens notes the recurrence of the figure of the young Robert Browning in poems written throughout the poet’s career. “The repeated reflection on his early poetics bears witness to Browning’s need to understand what attracted him to Romanticism and to construct a plausible narrative of how he accomplished the transition from derivative Romanticism towards his own distinctive poetics” (p. 23). Pauline is “one of several works by Victorians” exploring “the decadent extremes of Romantic introspection” (p. 25) and the poem’s paratexts involve “an attempt to distance himself from his earlier self as represented by the speaker” (p. 26). She finds “disguised self-reference in Pippa Passes and “Time’s Revenges,” “James Lee’s Wife,” and “Memorabilia,” the latter in particular recording “Browning’s loss of belief in the Romantic fusion of poet and poem into a single entity” (p. 44). However, disguised autobiography is also “an indication that Browning . . . is not yet willing to abandon an essentially Romantic author-based aesthetics” (p. 48). She reads Sordello as charting a “definitive transition from derivative Romanticism to his mature poetics” (p. 51), reviewing Sordello himself as a representation of the “egotistical Romantic poet,” and considering the poem’s relationship to Alastor and its echoes of Don Quixote, Dante, and Byron. She sees Browning...