ABSTRACT
The character of Robert Browning's early work — ambitious but vulnerable — owes something to his family circumstances. He was from a middle-class. Browning's contemporaries agreed he was a genius, but they were not all sure he was a poet. In his twenties he wrote Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello: all long, and all clad in the vesture of prestigious genres handed down from the Romantics; the poems are, respectively, a confessional fragment, a closet drama and a historico-psychological epic. Paracelsus was better received, especially in liberal periodicals, and more widely read: people began to talk of Browning as a Coming Poet. After Sordello, Browning continued to write monologues, even though he was now mainly trying, and failing, to make it as a playwright. These poems continue to balance familiarity and strangeness, but extend their scope to include national and historical difference and the rhetorics of aesthetic appreciation and political command.
