Selected poems of Robert Browning

For me, Browning is just the best. He can be as light as a souffle (but with a sharp kick), and achingly profound. He can build characters and he can be terrifying - not many psychological thrillers can be so chilling so succinctly as Porphyria's Lover, and he can capture the sweetness of first love. He's also shamefully neglected.

Well, that's that. My knowledge of Victorian poetry being poor as it is, I decided to give it a go recently. I had already found Alfred Lord Tennyson to be dragging and stuffy (although his work had its sparks) so I had braced myself for Robert Browning, despite his reputation for being otherwise challenging and no less dragging. What of it?

Poetry is subjective and so a matter of very personal taste. I like mine short and to the point; insightful; and with verses so striking in arresting ideas (e.g. I'm a great fan of personifications and metaphors) that they ought to be read again and again, even, learnt by heart. There's none of that here.

Now, I get that to admirers his monologues are masterpieces of a genre. To me, through, they're show more nothing but lines pilling up after lines and after lines and after lines; wearing on so tediously that -more than once!- I couldn't even understand what I was reading. About that, it's quite known that one of his poems, 'Sordello', was so long and confusing that Tennyson himself had quipped that he only understood the first and the last lines, with Jane Welsh Carlyle adding to the derision by claiming that, upon finishing reading it, she 'could not tell whether Sordello was a book, a city or a man'. Well, I felt that way exactly for nearly all of his poetry selected here!

To each their own. As far as I'm personally concerned, Browning's poetry is nothing but dull meandering and rambling, as muddled as it is devoid of feelings. It left me cold. show less

For me, Browning is just the best. He can be as light as a souffle (but with a sharp kick), and achingly profound. He can build characters and he can be terrifying - not many psychological thrillers can be so chilling so succinctly as Porphyria's Lover, and he can capture the sweetness of first love. He's also shamefully neglected.

Not my favorite poet.

Book Description: N.Y.: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1896. G . Red blind stamped cloth cober. pgs browning due top age. basic wear. includes ephemera: newspaper article from 1948 about Robert Browning & Elizabeth Browning (Their romantic story). pgs browning due to age. basic wear. Binding is Hard Cover.

$25

With woodcuts by Ian McNab