ABSTRACT
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett and became an ex-patriot poet, living in Italy until her death in 1861. Men and Women (1855) might suggest, therefore, a decisive break with the past. The old radical formation is left behind. Politics are displaced by aesthetics, public drama by private lyrics of love. Idiosyncratic, bizarre, arcane, the language and structure of the poems could signify a retreat into privacy. But, as the above quotation suggests, Browning and his wife were intensely committed to politics, European politics. In their perpetual political disagreements, Browning always took a more radical line, as in the dispute over the coup of Louis Napoleon in 1852. It is this ‘European’ progressivism which made conservative critics in England uncomfortable.
