ABSTRACT
Robert Browning was not, as many Victorian reviewers were fond of noting, a member of any recognizable 'school' of poetry. Still, as Lord David Cecil has said, 'Browning may be looked upon as the original English ancestor of the "modernist" school of English poetry'. Most modernist poets have held to a darker, more tragic version of human experience than did Browning; such poets have found they could learn from Browning's technique but had to ignore his 'optimism'. Thomas Hardy was a young apprentice architect and aspiring poet in London in the early 1860s when Browning began to gain a public reputation. Many Hardy poems are dramatic monologues, but like most modernist poems, Hardy's monologues tend to be shorter, less 'longwinded' than Browning's. Pound had been interested in the subject of Sordello since he had given a series of lectures on medieval Provencal and Italian poetry at the London Polytechnic in 1909.
