Browning Robert - Browning, Victorian poetics and the romantic legacy: challenging the personal voice

BROWNING, VICTORIAN POETICS AND THE ROMANTIC LEGACY

Taking an original approach to Robert Brownings poetics, Britta Martens focuses on a corpus of relatively neglected poems in Brownings own voice in which he reflects on his poetry, his self-conceptualization and his place in the poetic tradition. She analyzes his work in relation to Romanticism, Victorian reactions to the Romantic legacy, and wider nineteenth-century changes in poetic taste, to argue that in these poems, as in his more frequently studied dramatic monologues, Browning deploys varied dramatic methods of self-representation, often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker Browning. The poems thus become devices for Brownings detached evaluation of his own and of others poetics, an evaluation never fully explicit but presented with elusive economy for the astute reader to interpret. The confrontation between the personal authorial voice and the dramatic voice in these poems provides revealing insights into the poets highly self-conscious, conflicted and sustained engagement with the Romantic tradition and the diversely challenging reader expectations that he faces in a post-Romantic age. As the Victorian most rigorous in his rejection of Romantic self-expression, Browning is a key transitional figure between the sharply antagonistic periods of Romanticism and Modernism. He is also, as Martens persuasively demonstrates, a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study for addressing the perennial issues of voice, authorial authority and self-reference.

To Jim natrlich

Challenging the Personal Voice

BRITTA MARTENS
University of the West of England

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2011 Britta Martens

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Martens, Britta.

Browning, Victorian poetics and the Romantic legacy: challenging the personal voice.

1. Browning, Robert, 18121889 Technique. 2. Poetics History 19th century. 3. Self in literature. 4. English poetry 19th century History and criticism. 5. Romanticism Great Britain.
I. Title
821.8dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martens, Britta.

Browning, Victorian poetics and the romantic legacy: challenging the personal voice / by Britta Martens.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Browning, Robert, 18121889Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PR4238.M36 2011
821.8dc22

2011008608

ISBN 9781409423034 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315570389 (ebk)

Three major critical editions of Brownings work by Ohio University Press, Oxford University Press and Longman are still in progress. Only the much shorter two-volume Yale / Penguin edition, supplemented by an edition of The Ring and the Book, covers all of his poetical works, with the exception of the translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus and some uncollected poems.

In tracing the chronological development of Brownings attitude towards the Romantic tradition, I would have liked to use as my primary reference his works as they appear in all of their first editions. In the absence of a complete critical edition of all first editions and in view of the fact that Brownings textual revisions of later works are not as extensive or significant as those for earlier works, I have adopted the following policy: references to works up to 1861 are to the first editions, as collected in the first three volumes of the Longman edition; with the exception of The Ring and the Book, which is cited in its first edition as it appears in Richard D. Alticks Yale / Penguin edition, references to the works from 1862 onwards are to the 16-volume edition The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (London: Smith, Elder, 188889) which the Oxford, Yale / Penguin and Ohio editions use as their copy text. The final versions of these texts do not differ substantially from the first. Whenever there are textual differences between the first edition and the 188889 edition which are relevant for my analysis, I have taken these into consideration.

I gratefully acknowledge the University of the West of England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for periods of research leave, and the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, for a Visiting Research Fellowship. I also thank the Armstrong Browning Library for permission to reproduce their copy of Guercinos Angelo Custode, the Pierpont Morgan Library for permission to reproduce William Wetmore Storys sketch of Browning on the cover page, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University for permission to cite from Brownings autograph letter to John Kenyon. I have benefited from the kind assistance of staff at the above libraries as at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and especially the St. Matthias Library at the University of the West of England.