Robert Browning.

Martens, Britta

While no book-length studies on Browning have appeared during this review period, the year has seen a healthy number of articles which apply a variety of critical approaches to individual poems. They demonstrate how well the poet lends himself to many current critical paradigms, including queer and feminist interpretations, cognitive psychology, and readings informed by material culture and narratology.

I will begin with articles which focus on gender. In "Increasing Suspicion about Browning's Grammarian" (VP 44, no. 2 [Summer 2006]: 165-182), Arnd Bohm adds another name to the list of possible inspirations for "A Grammarian's Funeral": Brunetto Latini, whom Dante's Inferno places in the circle of sodomites, although there is no clear evidence that the scholar was a homosexual. Having explained that Brunetto may have been linked with sodomy through the suspicion of homosexual relationships between teachers and pupils and the medieval association of scholars interested in grammatical deviations with sexual deviance, Bohm reads Browning's poem as preoccupied with the grammarian's and the speaker's ambiguous gender identity. The evidence he proposes ranges from the arresting revelation that medieval scholars associated dactylic feet (which are prominent in Browning's poem) with the male genitalia and that the kinds of grammatical particles in which the grammarian is interested can be read as encoding homosexual tendencies, to a predictable reading of the speaker's use of the term "erect" and the rather unconvincing claim that the text is "blatantly reticent" (p. 171) about confirming the speaker's gender and therefore that his gender is ambiguous. By the same token, many other monologists whose gender is perfectly obvious but not explicitly stated would be confused about their sexuality. Although the grammarian's renunciation of his sexual identity certainly needs to be considered, the article did not leave me fully persuaded that the grammarian's "research was deeply rooted in his [homosexual] desires" (p. 178). The discussion of "the narrator's contempt for the city" (p. 174) also left me slightly puzzled, as the grammarian is not carried away from the cities in the plain, as Bohm states, but from a pastoral setting in the plain toward a city on top of a mountain (see 11. 14, 41-42, 73-74), playing on the associations of urbanity with culture and of prophets with the mountaintop (albeit probably ironically).

In a similar vein, Ernest Fontana's "Gender and Sexual Anxiety in Browning's 'Waring' and 'The Guardian-Angel,'" in the same issue of Victorian Poetry (pp. 183-189), offers a queer interpretation of these two poems as encoding Browning's feelings about an unrealized homosocial relationship or same-sex intimacy with Alfred Domett before his friend left for New Zealand. As in Bohm's article, the reading of a virile Waring seen in a boat in the company of a boy as evidence that "Waring has come out and is revealed in a tableau of festive homosociality" (p. 186) seems to me to rely on an overinterpretation of detail. Fontana's analysis of "The Guardian-Angel" as negotiating the transition from Browning's companionship with Domett to that with Elizabeth is more convincing, although it is not necessary to understand this in terms of "same-sex amatory feelings" (p. 187).

As the bicentenary year of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's birth, 2006 saw, of course, a substantial amount of critical material on her, but reference to Robert in these publications has as usual been quite sparse. This reluctance to consider the Brownings in conjunction may arise from the fact that, as Corinne Davies puts it, critics "over the years have felt the mutual influence, but found the proving elusive" ("Two of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Pan Poems and Their After-Life in Robert Browning's 'Pan and Luna,'" [VP 44, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 562]). It may also be a result of the different critical positions from which the two poets tend to be approached. Judging from some recent publications--Mary Saunders Pollock's monograph of 2003 and Corinne Davies and Marjorie Stone's "'Singing Song for Song': The Brownings 'in the Poetic Relation,'" in Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (eds.), Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, 2006), pp. 151-174--it would seem that Robert lends himself more readily to comparative analyses from a feminist stance than Elizabeth does to the main paradigms of Robert's critics. In their rich joint essay, which takes the original form of a correspondence, Stone and Davies review the various critical positions on the Brownings' literary relations. These are succinctly summarized by Stone: "RB specialists tend either to ignore EBB or to construct her as part of RB's 'circle' or as one of his 'audiences' (Lee Erickson's term), while feminist critics (as Auerbach said back in 1984) have treated RB as an 'ancillary presence' in setting out to recover a heroic grandmother. (I plead guilty on this count myself.)" (p. 160).

Davies is one of the critics with the least antagonistic view of the Brownings' literary relations. In her correspondence with Stone, she responds to Laura Haigwood's opinion that Robert's description of Sonnets from the Portuguese as a "strange, heavy crown" is a token of his sense of oppression. Instead, Davies sees this as "a key instance not of conflict but of RB 'singing song for song,' echoing his wife's sonnets and harking back to [the call for the reader's 'co-operating fancy' in] his 1835 preface in Paracelsus" (p. 160). Davies also argues that "The Flight of the Duchess," on which EBB commented so extensively in the courtship correspondence, responds to her "Romaunt of the Page," subverting conventions and gender stereotypes just as EBB had done. Davies proposes that both poets were attracted to the ballad-romance because "it provided them with a conventional literary site, ripe for revision, on which to play out their notions of social and sexual politics--which they acted out in their own flight to Italy" (p. 161).

Stone furnishes further evidence of this pervasive mutual influence, pointing to EBB's unpublished experiments with "dramatic impersonations" (EBB's term) and suggesting that her advocacy of monodrama influenced Robert's shift from stage drama to the internal drama of the dramatic monologue (pp. 164-165). The article offers a wealth of fascinating connections. Stone adds to the chain of intertextual relations by linking the gender politics in "The Flight of the Duchess" and "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point." Both critics reflect together on the significance of Robert's bracketed "[my EBB]" at the end of his annotated manuscript of the latter poem, playing with readings of this gesture as possessive encircling (Stone) or as loving embrace and an allusion to the marriage vow (Davies). The argument is then spun further to include Robert's circle of predecessors in "Childe Roland" and the invocation of EBB in The Ring and the Book. It is a real pleasure to witness Stone and Davies both reflect on and illustrate fruitful co-operation. The growing tensions between the poets in the 1850s and 60s, intriguingly suggested by the ambiguous imagery associated with EBB in "One Word More," are also given consideration, although the final verdict is that the couple's affinities outweigh their differences.

It is once again Corinne Davies who contributes the only comparative article to last year's voluminous special issue of Victorian Poetry on Elizabeth. Her article (cited above) examines textual interrelations between "The Dead Pan," "A Musical Instrument," and "Pan and Luna," focusing on the nexus of gender politics and poetics. She argues that both of the latter poems with their depiction of the goat-god's sexually charged chase of a female add a "feminist corrective" (p. 562) to "The Dead Pan" as a statement of Elizabeth's Christian, realist poetics. In "A Musical Instrument," the hollowed out reed which once was Syrinx links the cost and pain of poetic creation with the pain of the victimized woman, thus offering an alternative to the male-centered view of Pan as the egotistical Romantic artist. The sexual politics of "Pan and Luna" are more radical in their attempt to understand the woman's experience and the subversive suggestion that she enjoys the sexual encounter. This refusal to conceive of Pan in terms of a gendered power struggle, Davies concludes, "may lead us some way ... to a new gendered discourse in which the other becomes perceivable in new and less threatening ways" (p. 567). This argument could be related in interesting ways to the association of the moon with female promiscuity in "Andrea del Sarto," while it would form an intriguing contrast with Robert's recurrent association of Elizabeth with the moon, above all in "One Word More" and arguably in "Numpholeptos," where the male and female are in a power relationship which inverts the traditional hierarchy. These pervasive cross-references throughout the corpus of the Brownings' work illustrate why it seems so difficult to come up with a comparative study that does full justice to the complexity and subtlety of their mutual influences.

Taking very different critical approaches, two articles use Browning's poetry to explore new conceptual frameworks. Ivan Kreilkamp, in "'One More Picture': Robert Browning's Optical Unconscious" (ELH 73, no. 2 [Summer 2006]: 409-435), offers a fascinating analysis of two poems from Men and Women in relation to contemporary developments in photography. The article adds to the substantial body of recent criticism on the role of photography in Victorian culture and aims to demonstrate that the overlap with the discourse on photography elucidates Browning's participation in an emergent culture of modernity. Kreilkamp argues that "Mesmerism," in which the speaker's act of conjuring up, first the ghostly image, and then the very self, of his beloved in a darkened room, "adopts as its own timeframe and subject matter the slow development of 1840s photography" (p. 411) to which it explicitly refers. The poem explores the perceived proximity between mesmerism and the elaborate process of taking and developing photographs as well as the attempt to overcome the division between self and image which the advent of photography had made so tangible.

By contrast, "'Childe Roland' grapples with the sharp reduction in development time inaugurated by technical developments in the early 1850s and ... with the dawning of the first historical possibility of 'instantaneous' photography and such distinctly modern image forms and technologies as the snapshot and the electric flash" (p. 411). Kreilkamp focuses on the poem's final, climactic scene, in which Roland stands in front of the Dark Tower, illuminated by light effects which seem to anticipate flash photography. He is watched by the band of his predecessors, "a living frame / For one more picture." Kreilkamp relates this moment to critical concepts of modernity. Roland seems to fit into Walter Benjamin's definition of modernity as an age in which reproductions of the self proliferate, while his detailed perception of the nightmarish landscape, like "close-up" photography, gives access to what Benjamin calls an "optical unconsciousness" (p. 425). The final scene also illustrates Jurgen Habermas' definition of a moment of shock as specifically modern. The scene explores the dangerous side of the modern fascination with instantaneousness and mirrors attempts by contemporary photographers to overcome the need for long exposure time in order to capture the moment. In raising questions about how photography and the discourse it generated influenced the concept of temporality and the relationship between self and image, and in relating the reflections of these changes in Browning's poems to concepts of modernity which have so far not been applied to Victorian poetry, the article provides much food for thought.

In "Cognitive Science and the History of Reading" (PMLA 121, no. 2 [March 2006]: 484-502), Andrew Elfenbein uses contemporary reviews of Browning's poetry as a case study in his argument that concepts from cognitive psychology can enrich our understanding of reading processes by historical readers as well as literary critics and students in general. He draws on the vocabulary which cognitive science employs when analyzing the microprocesses of reading, such as the distinction between "online" reading, that is, processes of cognition which occur during the reading process, and "offline" reading, which occurs after reading, for instance in literary criticism. Browning commends himself to the task of exploring the variety of standards of comprehension which are used by different readers through his reputation as a difficult poet who encouraged in reviewers a high degree of "metacognition," that is, self-conscious reflection on one's reading process and especially on the desire to establish coherence. Elfenbein demonstrates how the aesthetic standards of three reviewers (Margaret Oliphant, Thomas McNicoll, and George Brimley) determine their reading experience of Men and Women, while William Morris' review--the only laudatory one--relies on new reading strategies.

Oliphant seeks to find coherence through emotional sympathy during the online reading process, when the poem should resonate with her personal experiential knowledge, but this immediate sense of coherence is inhibited by the mental effort needed to unravel Browning's complex syntax. McNicoll also expects that appreciation happens during online reading, but he looks for an intellectual rather than emotional component, hoping to "track thoughts." However, a lack of logical links and explanations in the text prevents him from establishing coherence. Brimley's aesthetic standard is Coleridgean organic unity. Unlike the other two critics, he reaches for background knowledge outside the text such as generic conventions, but is frustrated when a text like "Childe Roland," apparently an allegory, does not live up to generic expectations. Morris disregards barriers to comprehension in the online reading which baffle the other three critics and instead reads the poems as character sketches, a strategy which requires less cognitive effort than grappling with every aspect of Browning's language. He reads the poems in the context of each other, thus creating his own background information and discovering a coherence that the other critics cannot find. Elfenbein also traces the historical development of these different approaches, finding in Brimley a precursor of New Criticism and representing Morris as an influence on later Browning criticism which reads the dramatic monologues as character studies. The article thus suggests that the challenges posed by Browning's poetry contributed to conceptual changes in literary criticism. Elfenbein demonstrates convincingly that the cognitive approach can be useful to sharpen our awareness of how reading processes work. He is particularly interested in the experience of students who are easily overwhelmed by the cognitive demands placed on them by complex literary texts. Discussing their reading process in cognitive terms can certainly help them to understand their difficulties, to rationalize frustrating reading experiences, and, in an age when reflective learning is increasingly valued, to monitor their learning progress self-consciously.

Another article concerned with strategies of reading is Heather Morton's "'A Church of Himself': Liberal Skepticism and Consistent Character in 'Bishop Blougram's Apology'" (VP 45, no. 1 [Spring 2007]: 29-47). Morton situates the poem in the context of mid-century attacks on Tractarianism and Anglo-Catholicism which criticized the character of prominent Catholics as a way of attacking the institution. She links the eagerness of these critiques to denounce inconsistencies in writings by Catholics with the reader's search for contradictions in the dramatic monologue, arguing that "while critics of Newman and Wiseman point to inconsistency as a problem for character, Blougram claims it as an asset in a description that might also illustrate one of the dramatic monologue's principal attractions" (p. 37). The ability of this rational Catholic, who seems to be both a skeptic and a believer, to disrupt established dichotomies and live with contradictions makes the poem, in Morton's view, an intriguing hermeneutical challenge to readers, who have over the years largely continued to expect the same character consistency as the Victorians.

Laurence Lerner's "Browning's Painters" (YES 36, no. 2 [2006]: 96-108) provides a very accessible survey of some key critical debates surrounding the famous painter poems, such as the conjectures about the identity and artistic merits of "Pictor Ignotus." Lerner also discusses the psychoanalytical interpretations of"Andrea del Sarto," of which he is perceptively critical. The most interesting point for me is his attempt to explain why "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Old Pictures in Florence" (both, of course, published at the same time) advocate two opposed views on the merits of medieval painting with its emphasis on "soul" as opposed to painting that aims at a mimetic representation of the human body. The former poem portrays medieval religious painting as lifeless and needing liberation through Lippo's realistic skills, while the latter represents the medieval painting of "soul" as a token of progression in comparison to the static perfection of ancient Greek art. Although he does not spell this out, Lerner seems to account for this paradox by establishing a parallel with Browning's theory on the history of poetry as one of dialectic alternation between the opposed modes of objective and subjective art when he suggests that "once we cease to see history as regular progress, we can expect to see the contrary pull of soul and body occurring at any time" (p. 100).

Two issues of the Browning Society Notes appeared during the review period. Volume 31 (March 2006) contains three articles on Browning. In "'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha': Robert Browning's Organ for Light Denied" (pp. 7-21), Joseph A. Dupras offers an engaging close reading of this poem. The article, which eludes a brief summary, explores with sensitivity the intellectual challenges which the reader has to overcome in this complex poem.

Laura Rotunno's "'This Alone Would Drive Me to Despair': The Position of Anselm in Robert Browning's 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church'" (pp. 22-34) reflects on why Anselm is singled out from the collective of the Bishop's sons who surround his deathbed. The Bishop's preference for Anselm, the son's apparent detachment from his more materialistic brothers, and his name are, Rotunno suggests, indications that this monologue is not a straightforward condemnation of the speaker's blatant sensuality. The eleventh-century theologian Saint Anselm, whom Rotunno proposes as an inspiration for the Bishop's son, maintained that sin could not be redeemed through repentance but only through the sacrifice of Christ. Browning's unrepentant Bishop may therefore not be hopelessly damned. Saint Anselm also preached that both the soul and the body would be resurrected in the afterlife, a belief which strikes readers as ridiculous when articulated by the Bishop. Rotunno concludes that through the reference to Saint Anselm with his belief in "the merging of the spiritual and material, the poem allows the reader to adopt a cautiously sympathetic view of the Bishop, one in harmony with how Browning's Anselm," given his namesake's ideas of salvation, "might view his father" (p. 30). Such a reading makes the Bishop's strange ideas on his physical experience after death less surprising, but it also seems to suggest that Browning would, for the purposes of this poem, subscribe to a theological position which is quite far removed from his own beliefs.

Gary Scharnhorst's "Kate Field and the Brownings" (pp. 35-58) charts the acquaintance of the American journalist with the Brownings, detailing her contact with them in Florence during the late 1850s and focusing on her gradual falling out with Robert after Elizabeth's death. On Field's side, this is due to her unqualified veneration for Elizabeth and her increasing disparagement of Robert as a minor poet in comparison to his wife. The first indication of his distancing from Field is also the most striking one: his terse refusal in a letter of 1870 to Field's request for biographical information about Elizabeth for a projected lecture tour. For the Browning scholar, this reaction is hardly surprising in a decade when Browning grew increasingly wary of and annoyed by attempts to pry, as he saw it, into his, and especially his wife's, privacy. Field could be said to have exploited her personal acquaintance with Elizabeth to produce hagiographical essays on the poet and thus launch her career as a writer. Her perceived desire to profit from her access to both poets' private lives may thus be another contributing factor which drove Browning to vent his exasperation with intrusions into his privacy in Pacchiarotto.

Issue 32 of BSN (March 2007) contains select papers from the Browning Society's conference "'Our Italians': Anglo-Italian Relationships 1845-1865" at the Abbey of Vallombrosa, Tuscany, in 2005. Christopher M. Keirstead's "'He Shall be a "Citizen of the World'": Cosmopolitanism and the Education of Pen Browning" (pp. 74-82) considers the poets' son as an insight into Victorian attitudes toward identity and a "testing ground for a unique kind of cultural border-crossing, one that reflected his parents' sometimes competing notions of what it meant to be cosmopolitan" (p. 75). Keirstead explores the conflict between Elizabeth's wish to keep Pen as a neutral hybrid in terms of gender, languages, and religion and Robert's intention to turn him into an unambiguously English male, a project he implemented after Elizabeth died, while still trying to foster his son's broader European culture. The article offers an interesting biographical perspective on the Brownings' ideas on nationhood and culture, complementing Keirstead's earlier publications on cosmopolitanism in their poetry.

Maurizio Masetti's article "Lost in Translation: 'The Italian in England'" (pp. 17-26) charts the development of Browning's interest in Giuseppe Mazzini and his subsequent distancing from the Italian Republican leader as the Brownings came to prefer the possibility of a quick unification under a monarchy over Mazzini's more problematic and time-consuming republican solution. Masetti also addresses the question of Mazzini's lost translation of "The Italian in England," quoting from three letters by Mazzini to his mother which refer to enclosed passages of the translation and which leave no doubt that this text existed. Turning to the much disputed historical model for the revolutionary in Browning's poem, Masetti argues against the claim that he is based on the Neapolitan Bandiera brothers, who probably did not receive enough press coverage for Browning to be aware of them at the time of composition. Masetti therefore reverts to the contemporary reading of the speaker as inspired by Mazzini and also explains that Mazzini's admiration for the poem may be due to its love interest which by coincidence has echoes of Mazzini's own love affair.

My own "'Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life!': Robert Browning's Portrayal of Contemporary Italians" (pp. 4-16) considers Browning's relatively few, and usually deprecatory, references to nineteenth-century Italians in his correspondence and poetry. It situates his conceptualization of the Italian national temperament in relation to a number of contemporary ideas: not just the well explored historical theory which blames the Italians' political and social backwardness on their oppression by Austria and the Papal States, but also a hitherto neglected ahistorical theory. Developed in the eighteenth century but still current in the nineteenth, this theory sees a causal connection between climate, the human organism, and national character and provides a basis for the common stereotyping of the Italians as passive, sensual, and fun-loving. Browning's recourse to this theory in order to offer some explanation for the Italians' disappointing apathy in the face of secular and religious authorities is illustrated through an analysis of "Up at a Villa--Down in the City."

Another article by Ernest Fontana and two short contributions to ANQ should also be noted. In "Too Late: The Pre-Raphaelites, Tennyson, and Browning" (JPRS 15 [Spring 2006]: 50-60), Fontana offers an insightful reading of Browning's "Too Late" in light of the pictorial and textual representations by Tennyson, W. L. Windus, Adelaide Proctor, and Christina and D. G. Rossetti which link this phrase to the death of a woman. George Monteiro's "Scudder, Rolfe, and Browning" (ANQ 19, no. 3 [Summer 2006]: 14-16) presents a letter commenting on an 1887 American selection of Browning's poems. And in time for John Betjeman's centenary in 2006, Kevin J. Gardner's "John Betjeman's 'Bristol and Clifton': Echoes of Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess'" (ANQ 19, no. 3 [Summer 2006]: 35-38) argues for the Poet Laureate's debt to Browning's ironic monologues. There is also a short article by David Sonstroem on "The Laboratory" ("The Poison Within: Robert Browning's 'The Laboratory,'" VN 111 [Spring 2007]: 10-11), which discusses the speaker as a representative of the ancien regime. Sonstroem's argument--that for both the speaker and the ancien regime "aesthetics has supplanted ethics" and "the only value that matters is beauty" (p. 11)--could be complemented by a consideration of the speaker's desire for power and hedonism, which also figure prominently in her mind.

I also want to mention the work of Yann Tholoniat, currently the only French scholar publishing on Browning, who in 2003 completed a doctoral thesis on polyphony in the poet's work up to The Ring and the Book. I have not seen this thesis, but a number of articles published since 2004 in the French journals Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens and Imaginaires seem to build on it. These articles apply approaches by prominent French critics (Michel Foucault, Gerard Genette) and also Mikhail Bakhtin to Browning's work. This year's article, "Les Preliminaires textuels de Robert Browning" (Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 63 [April 2006]: 463-479), considers the titles, subtitles, and epigraphs of Browning's poems which were published between 1842 and 1864, drawing primarily on Genette's work on paratexts in Seuils (1987). It concludes that Browning shows an interest in (cross-) generic classification; he uses these paratextual devices to set up expectations, to establish a "reading protocol" and to stimulate his reader into interpretive activity. The scope of an article, of course, imposes limitations. Tholoniat's consideration of the three kinds of paratext in isolation from each other means that there is no space to analyze Browning's intricate play with these devices within the same poem. For instance, a closer reading of the relationship between the subtitle to "Holy Cross Day," the fictional diary entry by "the Bishop's Secretary" which serves as an epigraph, and the presumably authorial intervention "What the Jews really said ...," which contrasts the epigraph with the following dramatic monologue, would have allowed for a more nuanced evaluation of Browning's use of multi-perspectivism. Nonetheless, the article indicates areas of inquiry which may yield more detailed insights into Browning's use of these devices. As Tholoniat suggests, it might, for example, be fruitful to examine Browning's debt to the paratexts of Romantic lyrical dramas, a genre which Robert Langbaum saw as a major influence on the dramatic monologue.

I will close with a publication which does not present any new research but will be of interest to teachers of Browning: the new revised Norton critical edition of Robert Browning's Poetry. Andrew M. Stauffer has updated James F. Loucks' 1979 edition, retaining the bulk of Loucks' poems and notes, but making a few changes in the selection from the period leading up to The Ring and the Book. His additions respond well to the shifting critical preoccupation with spiritualism ("Mesmerism"), the Brownings' interest in Italy ("The Italian in England," "The Englishman in Italy," "The Patriot," and "'De Gustibus--'"), and feminist approaches to Browning ("Pompilia" replaces "Caponsacchi"), the latter being also reflected in the critical appendix. The complete text of Pauline--rather than Loucks' 4-page extracts--is also included. This is indeed a central text for anyone with a lively interest in the poet's development, and readers' appreciation of the poem's importance might have been heightened by the inclusion of some supporting material in the appendix. John Stuart Mill's notorious summarizing commentary on Pauline and Browning's very revealing self-defense in response to it would have been obvious candidates for inclusion in the section on Victorian critical views, which remains unchanged from Loucks' edition.

Contrasting with the Victorian section of the appendix, the selection of modern critical essays is almost completely new, with only Langbaum's classic "Sympathy Versus Judgment" from The Poetry of Experience and Bloom's reading of "Childe Roland" from The Ringers in the Tower surviving from the earlier edition. These have been supplemented with well-established essays by leading Browning critics of the past two decades, Isobel Armstrong (represented twice, with an extract from Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics and her reading of "Caliban"), Daniel Karlin ("Browning's poetry of intimacy"), and Herbert Tucker ("Dramatic monologue and the overhearing of lyric"). To these are added texts by Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor on Browning's silent auditors and readers, and by Catherine Maxwell on the Pygmalion myth, as well as readings of individual poems, by Stefan Hawlin on "A Toccata of Galuppi's," Erik Gray on "Andrea del Sarto," and Susan Brown on "Pompilia." Taken together, these essays offer an engaging, up-to-date first taste of Browning criticism. Unfortunately, there are a few misclassifications and omissions in the Selected Bibliography: the listing of Adam Roberts' selection of poems for Oxford University Press as an essay collection, the inclusion of Daniel Karlin's review of The Brownings' Correspondence instead of his selected edition of the courtship correspondence, and the absence of Langbaum's seminal Poetry of Experience. That said, the economically annotated poems and the new selection of critical essays provide an accessible and compact resource for today's student.