Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice by Britta Martens (review)

To determine how Robert Browning responded to the Romantics, critics have examined his struggles with individual predecessors, his early long poems, and his dramatic monologues. In this new study of the subject, by contrast, Britta Martens concentrates on poems normally overshadowed by the critical prestige of the dramatic monologues: those in Browning’s own voice, in propria persona. These poems should replace the dramatic monologues as the best indicators of Browning’s attitude toward Romanticism, Martens argues, since in them he self-consciously reflects “on poetics and on his place within the poetic tradition.” In these poems, Browning invites us to respond to his personal voice in much the way we do to Andrea del Sarto’s: he dramatically presents himself, “often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker ‘Robert Browning’” (3). In six chapters of gracefully contextualized close readings, Martens demonstrates that by adopting a seemingly personal voice, even as he distanced this voice as a dramatic projection, Browning challenged and selectively appropriated the self-expression that he and other Victorians identified with the Romantics.

Martens offers a more complex account of Browning’s poetics and poetic development than the story familiar to scholars, according to which Browning rejected the Romanticism he early emulated. She rewrites this narrative largely by refining the model of literary influence driving Harold Bloom’s The Ringers in the Tower (1971), in which Bloom influentially claimed Browning as a prime example of what he called the anxiety of influence, a poet who creatively misread a predecessor, Percy Bysshe Shelley, to assert his own originality. Instead, Martens claims, scholars must recognize Browning’s ability “to distance himself from some aspects” of a Romantic poet’s work even as he “acknowledge[s] his debt to others” (21). Browning, for example, “imitates” William Wordsworth’s prefaces, where Wordsworth solicits readers’ cooperation even as he dismisses his need for public approval; but Browning does so to model his “self-conceptualization as an unappreciated innovator who supplants Wordsworth” (257). She also shows that Browning’s sense of Romantic poetics extended well beyond a single predecessor to include qualities he detected in a range of writers (especially Wordsworth, Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau); his own early Romanticism; Victorian authors who adapted Romantic aesthetics, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a number of late-century poets; and the values of accessibility and sincerity that the Victorian literary market linked to Romantic lyricism.

The most original chapters are the third, on Browning’s poetic dialogue with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Romanticism; the fifth, on Browning’s use of dramatic self-representation in The Ring and the Book (1868–69) to acknowledge a readership divided between those influenced by “utilitarianism and positivism” (175) and those committed “to the Romantic concept of the poet as a vatic mediator of transcendental truths” (167); and the sixth, on Browning’s criticism, in later poems in his own voice, of the desire for Romantic self-expression among Victorian poets, critics, and readers. When discussing Browning’s reactions to Barrett Browning’s Romanticism, for example, Martens departs from the focus of previous scholars on “the Brownings’ personal relations” (92), instead charting Browning’s complex vacillation between “struggl[ing] against the self-expressive poetry associated with” his wife and “avoid[ing] a confrontation of” their “opposed poetics” by “submissive[ly] shift[ing]” the “focus” of his poems “onto her” (131). In the process, Martens offers fresh readings of poems and passages in propria persona from Men and Women (1855), The Ring and the Book, the prologue to Fifine at the Fair (1872), and the fierce defense of Barrett Browning in “To Edward Fitzgerald” (1889).

Martens recognizes the temptation to equate Browning’s self-serving representations of Romanticism and its Victorian inheritance with Romantic authors and ideas themselves. She emphasizes that Browning often creates “a reductive version of Romanticism” by singling out its...