Robert Browning's Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Criticism

by Robert Browning, Stopford Augustus Brooke, introduction) Browning, Robert; Knickerbocker, Kenneth L. (editor

Book Overview

The poems are ordered chronologically according to their first appearance in book form. Thirteen new poems are included in this edition, with Pauline now printed in its entirety. Annotations have been... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393090922
• ISBN13: 9780393090925
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 620 Pages
• Weight: 1.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.1" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Browning as never before

"Grow old along with me!/ The best is yet to be ...." Great line--quoted recently and beautifully by Christopher Plummer in the popular movie "Must Love Dogs," but did you know it comes from the poem "Rabbi Ben Ezra"? This book discovers Browning as never before. Not only will you find the chestnuts you've heard over the years, but you will read them in context. Not only will you see the breadth and depth of this poet's work, but also find extraordinary essays on his technique and discussions of specific poems by Carlyle and James and Hopkins sitting right next to essays by Harold Bloom and other present-day luminaries. And to boot, you won't be overwhelmed by footnotes, but when you find one, it will be in plain English. This is a book to treasure.

A Note on the Cambridge Edition of Browning

I just want to leave a note on the Cambridge Edition of Browning. The type is rather small and double column. It may be difficult for some people for extended reading. However, it is a large volume that includes everything as far as I know, so for the price it might be worth your while if you want to have all of Browning on hand.

Good introductory anthology.

This is as good as you'll find for a brief one-volume, in-print collection of some major Browning poems. Browning, as Pound himself made clear, is the forerunner of "modernism," his poetry capable of outdoing Pound's in difficulty because of the labyrinthian syntax in pursuit of meanings which for their originator, at least, were clear. Even "Sordello," the ultimate poem about the ultimately self-conscious troubador, was too much for Ezra, who couldn't get on with his Cantos until distancing himself from its difficulties. With all due respects to the other reviewer, Browning is a "Christian" poet but no orthodox one. He believes in a dynamic Incarnation repeating itself throughout creation and in every moment of existence. Grace and redemption, however, are relatively foreign if not alien concepts to him--one of the reasons it's quite accurate to think of him as the most "optimistic" poet, if not author, in all English literature. Life is purposeful becoming: there's no need to mourn or forgive the past. Also, any reader may read, or teacher teach, "My Last Duchess" without guilt. Though certain readers might find it easy or convenient to reduce the Duke to a two-dimensional character, to do so is to produce a willful or ignorant misrepresentation of him. His rhetoric alone is dazzling, complex, as obfuscating as it is revealing of his character. Moreover, the poem also has the characters of the Duchess and Envoy to evaluate, both of whom become complex in proportion to the maturity and perceptiveness of an ever-present 4th character--you, the reader (or "implied reader," as the Reader-Response crowd would designate him). Lesson: Don't mess with Browning unless you're willing to become an active participant in the poetry which, admittedly, can involve considerable patience, time and work. Even Pound is easier, if only because he allows a reader more "wiggle room."

A nice idea

This anthology is based on a nice idea. Instead of representing each of the Browning's separately it presents them together. Their life story and poetry are bound up with each other. And this volume shows to a degree their development together.

A good reference!

I am a fan of Robert Browning, and believe him to be one of the best Christian poets from the Victorian age.In the introductions to poems that I've read, the editor James Loucks, perhaps to be "objective," fails to even make the slightest mention of Browning's Christianity, or how that could have affected the themes of his poems.In Browning's earlier dramatic monologues such as "My Last Duchess," his characters are wholly villainous or otherwise two-dimensional. They don't have any redemptive qualities about them at all. However, in Browning's mature dramatic monologues, his characters have specks of redemptive qualities, and this makes them real, and even makes the characters human.In "an Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician," Karshish meets Lazarus shortly before the fall of the Jewish Temple.Loucks says that "the title refers to an imaginary encounter between an itinerant Arab . . . long after [Lazarus] was raised from the dead by Jesus. Since the conflict experienced by Karshish -- that of positivism opposed to the will to believe -- was shared by many of Browning's contemporaries, the poem has a modern resonance" (127).He leads the reader to believe that Browning was trying to express and maybe even uplift the belief of unbelief, to praise his 'scientific' contemporaries, yet this is far from the case. Browning, a Christian, in part shows how the Incarnation, God becoming Man, could strongly twang the beliefs that Karshish has of God -- that the body entraps the soul, and that the soul and body are wholly separate and cannot be mixed.I will conclude with a quote from this poem where Karshish, in a redemptive moment, briefly opens his eyes to the power of the Incarnation: The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too-- So, through the thunder comes a human voice Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here! Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, But love I gave thee, with myself to love, And thou must love me who have died for thee!" (lines 304-311)