ABSTRACT
The critical perception of Browning as a poet who sought impersonality or objectivity still circulates. The fact that it does distorts the record of Browning’s experiments in self-representation in later works from The Ring and the Book (1868-69) to Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), La Saisiaz (1878) and the Parleyings (1887). The myth is set in motion by Browning himself in the 1850s, when he writes his “Essay on Shelley” and publishes Men and Women, which ends with the poet’s dedication of the collection to his wife and his declaration that he will “for once,” speak as himself in his verse. The notion of an objective Robert Browning is a useful critical fi ction, particularly in the case of the works which will always receive the most attention, the dramatic monologues. It should not overshadow the fact that elements of self-representation exist in poems written throughout Browning’s career and that in later works, Browning creates a speakernarrator who dramatizes a version of himself. In a well-known passage from the courtship correspondence, Elizabeth Barrett talks about Browning’s gift for impersonation in art – the dramatic mode – and famously encourages him to express his personality more directly in his work. Like so many observers of Browning as a person, Barrett seizes on Browning’s “superabundant mental life & individuality.” She adds,
Yet I am conscious of wishing you to take the other crown besides, – & after having made your own creatures speak in clear human voices, to speak yourself out of that personality which God made, & with the voice which He tuned into such power . . . I do not think that, with all that music in you, only your own personality should be dumb, nor that having thought so much & deeply on life & its ends, you should not teach what you have learnt, in the directest & most impressive way, the mask thrown off . . . And it is not, I believe, by the dramatic medium, that poets teach most impressively . . . [The reader] is apt to understand better always, when he sees the lips move. ([25 May 1846]; BC 12.358-59)
Browning most often dramatizes distinctive other identities in his poems, but there are many times throughout his career, particularly in poems in
which the protagonist has no specifi c identity, in which the point of departure for the poet’s refl ections is Browning’s own experience. In other words, Browning does what Barrett suggests more often than the rhetoric of the “Essay on Shelley” might imply.
