ABSTRACT
In naming the Psychological School of poetry, the issues opened up are much more complex, and therefore more vague. The term, as relating to followers of a leadership, is perhaps rather prophetic than now applicable. The great leader of the school, Browning, has followed a course so intensely original, that near imitations of him would be excessively difficult to effect: a course so unpopular hitherto that such imitations, even if practicable, have been uninduced by the market considerations which, of themselves, must have sufficed to furnish innumerable aspirants to Tennysonian imitation. At the same time there is scarcely a poet of mark now among us in whose works the influence of Browning may not be clearly discerned.… This ‘nobler stage the soul itself’ is precisely the only stage made use of by Browning in the psychological monologue, whether Mrs. Browning had that idea in her mind or not; and it is the development and perfection of this monologue that yields the most important line of observation for the critic to take up in discussing Browning’s labours. Pauline is the natural ancestor of The Ring and the Book: these two, his earliest and latest known poems, are the terminal vertebrae of of the spinal column of his works regarded as a body; and around that column are matters, by no means unimportant, but, still, less important —the dramas already referred to, some few pieces not strictly psychological monologues, one dramatic poem, one analytic narrative poem, and one prose piece.
