Browning's bodies and the body of criticism.

Gibson, Mary Ellis ; Martens, Britta

That's my last duchess painted on the wall Gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorence! Just for a handful of silver he left us Vanity, saith the Preacher, vanity! That second time they hunted me No more wine? Then we'll push back chairs and talk. My first thought was, he lied in every word Oh, Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find! But do not let us quarrel any more I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak! Let us begin and carry up this corpse ['Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best Stop, let me have the truth of that! Now, don't sir! Don't expose me! Just this once! (1)

Gentle readers, you've by now caught my drift. This issue of Victorian Poetry celebrates the bicentenary of Robert Browning's birth. What better way to commemorate Browning's beginning than with the beginnings of his poems?

The list above, first lines that might emerge easily from memory, creates a panoply of voices-abrupt, colloquial, direct or seemingly so, demanding. Most of these lines begin monologues published in Men and Women. Though familiarity might dull their freshness, since a seasoned reader almost always recalls the next line, taken as the group they still have the power to arrest. To amuse. To baffle.

Who would begin a poem with a bracket and an apostrophe? With a line stopped by three exclamation marks? With an unknown person enjoining us to "carry up this corpse"? The examples multiply. How strange to commence a poetic career with a long passage from Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, the first two words of which are "Non dubito." How strange to begin an epic with a question.

And yet Browning's beginnings often have a brilliance beyond the arresting and the strange, since they commonly arrive in a syntactic rush, compelling us forward into the next line, the next idea. "But do not let us quarrel anymore" impels us directly into the next negative, "No, my Lucrezia," which in turn compels us toward the further negative, our later recognition that Lucrezia is both too much Andrea's "my Lucrezia" and not his at all. The liar--or was he in "Childe Roland"?--fast becomes "that hoary cripple with malicious eye." Karshish, who's already filled our mouth or minds with coinages, plunges on to call himself, in a negative mouthful, "the not incurious in God's handiwork."

Or take the beginning of The Ring and the Book: "Do you see this Ring?" (2) We are supposed of course to answer "yes," but, of course, our answer is no. We don't see the ring, not really. It isn't described directly, appearing only through a historical narrative of its pedigree (and the pedigree of its pedigree and the possible circumstances of its manufacture). The poet follows his question with an onslaught of qualifiers and the famous--or infamous--knotty metaphor of "repristination," with its barely concealed baggage of religious controversy. The verse paragraph that begins, "Do you see this Ring," ends with a second question, almost offhand: "What of it? 'Tis a figure, a symbol, say; / A thing's sign: now for the thing signified." In the next verse paragraph, the "thing" signified actually comes as a question too: "Do you see this square old yellow Book"?

Editorial Edifices

Browning's poetry, as Herbert Tucker remarked years ago, is "radically introductory." It carries with it almost always a "sense of inauguration." (3) Or as Tucker more recently said of The Ring and the Book, it makes "multiple fresh starts." (4) On the original publication of Men and Women, John Ruskin called Browning's multiple beginnings "ellipses," alluding to semantic gaps, and to meter, rhyme, syntax and punctuation all at once. In his famous letter to the poet about a volume that caused him considerable struggle, he pronounced Browning's ellipses "quite Unconscionable." "Before one can get through ten lines, one has to patch you up in twenty places" (Selected Poems, p. 880).

If we turn to other readers of Browning--those who have published essays and books in the past few years--we find they have often indeed "patched" the poet up in twenty places, supplying his ellipses, glossing his obscurities.

We are fortunate to have not one, but three in-progress or recently completed editions of the poet's work, as if it were impossible to patch up all Browning's ellipses in one edition alone.

These varied editions, as Isobel Armstrong points out in the critics' roundtable in this issue, make fertile ground for comparison; each engages Browning's work on the basis of different editorial premises. I will not rehearse here the detailed responses to many edited volumes published in recent years that have been provided in the Year's Work articles in Victorian Poetry, but it is important to note of the Oxford University Press edition, as of the OhioUniversity Press/Baylor University and Longman editions, that all provide significant critical, biographical, and editorial scholarship. Certainly Browning has been blessed in his recent editors--Ashley Bland Crowder and Allan C. Dooley for Ohio/Baylor; Michael Meredith for Oxford; and Daniel Karlin, Joe Phelan, and John Woolford for Longman.

For readers relatively new to textual scholarship on Browning, I do want to note here the broad differences among these editions. The most important variation between the Ohio/Baylor and Oxford editions, on the one hand, and the Longman edition on the other lies in their choice of copy text, with Ohio and Oxford taking the more traditional route of basing their reading text on the author's last supervised edition (where that supervision was meaningful), and the Longman edition using as copy text the first published edition. All three editions provide variants, with the Ohio edition now providing all textual variants in a useful format and the Longman edition noting substantive variants introduced in editions subsequent to the first that were supervised by the poet. Were one to ask students to compare the editions of a particular poem--zeroing in on a poem that underwent significant revision over time under Browning's supervision--the results would be interesting, clarifying for students that texts are always the results of collaboration, as editors at the original publishing houses, printers, authors, and scholarly editors leave their fingerprints on both linguistic and bibliographical codes.

The Oxford University Press edition is still incomplete, but it published (a-chronologically) in 2009 volume 15, including Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day and Asolando. In Browning's bicentenary year, the concluding volume of the Ohio/Baylor edition, which contains Asolando, along with the essay on Strafford that he co-authored with John Forster in 1836 and ninety-nine fugitive pieces, has appeared. The volume also provides a title index to the entire seventeen-volume edition. Also available since spring 2012 is volume 4 of the Longman edition, The Poems of Browning, 1861-1871, which includes most of the wonderful poems in Dramatis Personae (1864).

All three editions have much to offer to the serious reader. The only downside to the Longman principle of presenting poems in the order of their composition, rather than in the order of their publication, is that the reader must imaginatively reconstruct Browning's volumes as volumes, keeping in mind, for example, the pairing of monologues between the two volumes of Men and Women, or in the case of the Dramatis Personae reminding herself that "May and Death" and "The Worst of It" have appeared in Longman volume 3 rather than in volume 4 with the rest of the poems from the collection. Given the riches of all three editions, the serious student should have more than one edition at hand where possible. In this context, a great contribution of the Longman edition is the easily accessible and coherent headnote to each poem. These notes, really mini-essays, include discussion of each poem's biographical genesis, publication history, historical and literary sources, meter and form, and parallels to other Browning poems. The latter feature is especially helpful in providing readers a path through the whole oeuvre--newcomers to Browning will find these parallels especially suggestive.

In the Longman edition, Karlin, Phelan, and Woolford also translate, so to speak, Browning's difficult syntax. This editorial practice makes especially useful for teaching purposes their one-volume Selected Poems (2010), which provides students, scholars, and also general readers a way to appreciate the variety of Browning's thematic, metrical, and formal experiments. While this single volume obviously has the attraction of compactness and, within those limits, of complete apparatus, in a more advanced course, one ideally would want to ask students to make use of all three editions (with appropriate caveats about the earliest Ohio volumes).

Although the most substantial critical work on Browning in the last ten years no doubt resides in these three fine editions, the edition of the Brownings' correspondence now underway and the newly completed edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry also provide essential materials.

Both the Armstrong Browning Library and the Wedgestone Press, publishers of the Browning correspondence, have provided crucial support to Browning studies. It is true that Robert Browning was a much less prolific correspondent than his wife, and the letters published to date naturally are dominated by Elizabeth's voice. As I have argued elsewhere, EBB's letters are a pleasure in themselves, and yet of course once the two poets become acquainted EBB's letters tell us much about Robert's life and work as well. Moreover, the letters when published are being made available as full text on line that can be searched in multiple ways. A search for letters between Robert and his uncle Reuben, the banker, for example provided me with a mini-lesson in the poet's financial anxieties during the first years of his marriage. I knew, of course, that Robert worried about money, but reading his letters to his banker uncle brought this relatively abstract notion home to me in all its worried detail. In these letters we see Robert fretting about letters of credit, dividends, and his ability to access cash from British banks on his European travels. The anxiety of living from dividend to anticipated dividend with minimal cash reserves in a world before traveler's checks or debit cards is palpable.

To take another example, from the most recent volume of correspondence (the eighteenth of the projected forty volumes), I searched quickly for Robert's letters to George Barrett. Though Elizabeth corresponded much more often than Robert with members of her family, conveying greetings from Robert and news of their doings, here we find in small compass a vivid sense of Robert's gratitude in 1852 for the reconciliation between EBB and her brother. At the same time, we get in a single letter a vivid depiction of the two poets' famous disagreement about French politics, their argument about Louis Napoleon's assumption of absolute power. After heartfelt thanks to George, Robert writes from Paris to George in London, expressing his dismay at the highhanded proceedings of the future Napoleon III: Is it not strange that Ba cannot take your view, not to say mine & most people's, of the President's proceedings? I cannot understand it--we differ in our appreciation of facts, too--things that admit of proof. I suppose that the split happens in something like this way--we are both found agreeing on the difficulty of the position with the stupid, selfish & suicidal Assembly--when Louis Napoleon is found to cut the knot instead of untying it: Ba approves. I demur--still, one must not be pedantic and overexacting, and if the end justifies the beginning, the illegality of the step may be forgotten in the prompt restoration of the law--the man may stop the clock to set it right. But his next procedure is to put all the wheelwork in his pocket, and promise to cry the hour instead--which won't do at all. (5)

Browning's political frustration emerges clearly as he complains to George about Louis Napoleon and also about the censorship that makes him have to triangulate developments in French politics through the British press. He must get news from George and his other British friends, he says, for "every other voice is mute--and 'voice' means the speech of a man to his neighbor in the street." Ah well, the poet concludes, with a rather bitter sigh, "Meantime one must make one's little, satisfying world out of & inside the great one--& be happy there." What a pair of vivid images--the dictator stops the clock of state to set it right and ends by putting it in his pocket; the poet takes the disappointment personally, viscerally, and hopes against hope to make a "little, satisfying world" inside the great one. The letter is one quarter gratitude to George and three quarters politics, with only this hope for a "little" happier world at the end. The great world, one has to feel, is inside the little, the political world inside the domestic one.

In such passages as these, the edition of the letters provides a day-by-day sense of life as experienced by two poets, both of whom were passionate about verse, about politics, about friendship and ideas. We can only be grateful to the ongoing labors of the editors over the past years--Phillip Kelley, Ronald Hudson, Scott Lewis, and more recently Edward Hagan. Of course, other productions of Wedgestone Press are also significant, including, most recently, the letters between the Brownings and Isa Blagden, edited by Phillip Kelley and Sandra Donaldson, with Lewis, Hagan, and Rita Patteson (2009).

Finally, the astonishing editorial edifice of recent Browning studies rests upon the labors of the editorial team that just completed the five volume Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). The general editor Sandra Donaldson, and the editorial team of Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone, and Beverly Taylor, along with their larger team of editors, have provided the indispensable complete critical edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning that scholars have long needed. Notwithstanding EBB's importance in her own time and for general readers since (despite her scholarly eclipse in the middle of the twentieth century), it gives one pause to realize that more than a century separated the last complete critical edition of her work, published in 1900 by Charlotte Porter and Helen Clark, from this modern scholarly edition. The five volumes in the Pickering and Chatto edition more than supply the need for a uniform edition of the published poems--the editors also provide many uncollected or unpublished poems and edit EBB's prose texts as well.

In sum, the editorial edifice of Browning scholarship is a strongly grounded and capacious building--large enough to house the many volumes of Robert's work, the substantial oeuvre of EBB, the side chapels of their letters (like Wordsworth's poem just about long enough to overwhelm what we might otherwise consider the main building), and many intellectual excursions besides.

Critical Excursions

What other houses have been built with materials provided by these many editorial labors? Some, in recent years, but not many. I want to mention here only recent books on Browning, while acknowledging the editors of Victorian Poetry, SEL, Victorian Literature and Culture, the newly reinvigorated Journal of Browning Studies (formerly Browning Society Notes), and the editors of other journals who have continued to publish strong articles on the poet.

Turning to recent books, I remark how few on the ground they be, though Browning does feature importantly in monograph chapters and essay collections. Not surprisingly, in the context of so much editorial work, biography has an important place. The biographical texts include, notably, Pamela Neville-Sington's entertaining and smart book, Robert Browning: A Life After Death, which weaves a tale (and a critical narrative) almost entirely from contemporary sources (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). Equally interesting is the more traditionally organized critical biography, The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life, begun by Richard S. Kennedy and completed by Donald S. Hair (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2007). The latter half of this volume is particularly rich in critical readings.

Suzanne Bailey's Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning's Poetry (London: Routledge, 2010) is properly speaking a biocritical analysis, arguing for Browning as writing through the advantages and disadvantages of something we would now think of as ADHD. Whether one fully credits this retrospective diagnosis (or for that matter the contemporary application of it to children of artistic sensibilities), Bailey offers fresh insight into issues of perception, synesthesia, and cognition in Browning's poems.

When we turn to critical monographs, rather than biographical books and editorial endeavors devoted to Browning, the pickings have become quite slim in the past few years. Reasons for this trend are not far to seek. While there are serious recent examples of excellent extended work on the poet, significant readings of Robert Browning have for the most part migrated entirely to book chapters and articles (see for example chapters in Herbert Tucker's Epic and Clinton Machann's Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading and essays by Yopie Prins, Daniel Karlin, and Donald Hair). (6) Before turning to monographs that have recently appeared, I want to reflect for a moment on the conditions of their creation. No one can ignore the systematic de-funding of university presses, these presses' consequent search for books with potential cross-over markets and appeal to the mostly mythical "general reader." We are only too aware of the consolidation of trade presses that once published serious scholarship (Longman has been acquired by Pearson for example). Young scholars know that such trends have an immediate influence on the direction of their graduate work and on strategic decisions about their chances for job placement and publication. Add to these economic realities the critical and ideological shifts in the discipline of literary study, a long migration away from poetry that has only recently begun to reverse itself, and one sees in Robert Browning studies a dramatic change over the past three or four decades.

To document these trends, I surveyed dissertations in the U. S., as reported by Dissertation Abstracts, over four decades. The table below represents my results. I have divided dissertations as follows (and there is a certain element of subjectivity in the process): 1) dissertations with Robert Browning at their center; 2) dissertations addressing "Robert Browning and Others" (these dissertations have a historical or theoretical coherence that is compelling, and generally, but not always, focus on nineteenth-century British literature); and 3) dissertations that might best be described as "Browning Tangentially" (these dissertations mostly fell into the category of "my favorite writers" grouped together, or they covered so many authors that Browning was clearly of limited importance to their conclusions).

Obviously the data in Table 1 is incomplete, not representing dissertations from the U.K., Australia, or New Zealand, and not completely representing the U. S. and Canada. For purposes of comparison, however, the statistics are striking. As indexed by Dissertation Abstracts, between 1970 and 1979 PhD students in the U.S. and Canada wrote a total of 62 dissertations on Robert Browning (as principal subject). In 2000-2009 they wrote a total of 4 dissertations. Little wonder that few and far between are the papers at the North American Victorian Studies Association devoted to Browning.

[TABLE 1 OMITTED]

I am not one to argue that such a change is deleterious to other areas of study or to the investigation of broad questions and ideas. Yet it is also clear that many dissertations before 1980 focused on the whole of the Browning corpus in the contexts of larger social, political, and religious issues; a number of these dissertations issued in significant books. Now only the most persistent (foolhardy?) doctoral student will finish a dissertation ready to write a book on Robert Browning; nor would a kindly advisor, at least in the U.S., suggest the project as conducive to professional success. And yet--as the multiplication of editions, biographies, and letters just reviewed suggests--a quick trip into the work of Robert Browning is likely to be fraught with difficulty. Sinking down, reading the whole corpus--what might be imagined, given the new archives, new ideas, new questions about the nineteenth century, what might be imagined to come of that?

One answer lies in my co-editor, Britta Martens' new book Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); another, somewhat narrower answer is offered in John Haydn Baker's Browning and Wordsworth (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004); and yet another in John Woolford's "introduction" to Robert Browning (Writers and their Work [Tavistock, UK: Northcote House, 2007]).

Woolford's introduction to Browning actually belies its title. Unlike the earlier introduction he co-authored with Daniel Karlin (Robert Browning [London: Longman, 1996]), which was organized around broad topics and emphasized contexts, Woolford's more recent volume has a tighter thematic focus. Though, again, he offers much to the general reader, Woolford makes a cogent argument for the grotesque as key to Browning's work and places Browning's grotesquerie in contexts ranging from the Romantic sublime to modern theories of the grotesque. Both Baker and Martens take up the thread of Browning's relationship to Romanticism.

Baker's Browning and Wordsworth volume argues for a correction to the generally held view that Shelley was the most important influence on Browning. Baker pursues Browning's relationship to Wordsworth from Paracelsus to Fifine at the Fair, and he argues that some two decades after the publication of The Prelude Browning acknowledged he had been too quick to judge the elder poet. Rather, Baker argues, The Prelude as Browning read it would have made him reckon again with what Baker calls Wordsworth's humanism--or what I would prefer, as Martens does, to call his humanitarianism. Although the "Browning would have thought" construction undergirds Baker's argument rather more often than I find comfortable, the volume as a whole illuminates for readers the long poetic output of both writers in tandem, providing many useful insights about Browning's literary debts along the way.

A broader and hence still more important and provocative book is my co-editor Britta Martens' new monograph, Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice. (Disclaimer--your two editors are cooperating on this introduction, but these comments are solely my own). This wide-ranging and intellectually astute volume treats the whole of Browning's oeuvre in its Victorian contexts, by focusing on poems that "engage with, rather than reject outright, the poet's self-expressive voice" (p. 256). Treating both thematic and formal elements of these poems, and the tensions expressed through them, Martens enables us to read Romanticism's poetic legacies--for good and ill--in new and productive ways. Her focus on Browning's self-expressive voice, rather than on the more familiar monologues, takes us directly into the poet's dilemmas, the challenges of crafting a new kind of poetry within and against the legacies of Romanticism. Browning embeds these "aesthetic conflicts within the same text, crossing the hierarchical boundary between literary text and authorial paratext" (p. 255). This liminal and experimental Browning, emerges clearly in Martens' analysis, beginning with the paratexts of Pauline and the indirections of the essay on Chatterton. Martens goes on to illuminate the formal and thematic tensions attendant on "disguised self-reference" in the early dramatic monologues and Pippa Passes. Her study ends by rereading the often-devalued poems of La Saisiaz and Pacchiarotto. The poems of Pacchiarotto, Martens shows, enact a critique of Romantic sincerity and, in their attacks on Byron and Rousseau, "are an indicator of Browning's crucial position as a precursor of modernism" (p. 241). In her reading of the Browning canon, Martens' focus on prologues and epilogues is crucial--these, she demonstrates, are the places where the poet most openly engages and resists self-expression and hence engages and resists the power of Romantic poetics.

Martens' analysis is of a piece with Tucker's argument in Epic that Browning makes epic "the occasion for going to the one place where that disembodied ghost-writer of monologues could never go: into the owned duties, and embarrassments, of determinate and existentially exigent reality" (p. 441). Determinate and exigent realities also invade Browning's beginnings and endings. They seep out from the confines of the epic and into the experimental incommensurabilties of his shorter poems as well.

On this bicentennial occasion of the poet's own beginning, it is a pleasure to report that, however endangered the monograph on a single author may be, Browning's knotty poetry still compels substantive engagement. We read anew through the good offices of the poet's editors and critics. We rediscover language, formal experimentation, and political and emotional issues that still compel us. We might pause at the introduction of any volume of Browning's poetry to exclaim like the speaker of "Dis Alter Visum; or, Le Byron de nos Jours," "Stop, let me have the truth of that!" The truth eludes us like the imagined consummation of Browning's not-quite-would-be-lovers.

(Mary Ellis Gibson / University of North Carolina at Greensboro)

Introduction to the Essays

In response to our call for papers for this special issue, we received an impressive crop of submissions--impressive both in their quality of fresh engagement with Browning's work and in their number. They were far too many to include within the limited space of one issue, but we hope that some pieces we were unable to include will make their way into future volumes of Victorian Poetry. The nine essays included here are arranged in chronological order, guiding us from Browning's early poetry to his later works and finally to his influence on two later poets.

One could hardly go back further in a poet's career than does Linda Peterson, who scrutinizes the title page of Browning's first publication, Pauline. The poem's elaborate paratext has attracted significant critical attention, but Peterson goes further than previous critics in probing why Browning chose epigraphs from the Renaissance "heretics" Clement Marot and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. She argues that the young poet encoded his ambition to usher in a renaissance in poetry through the association with authors whom he saw as innovators and anti-establishment figures, while also critically distancing himself from his own presumption. These ambitions were undermined, however, by the other name on the title page, that of the publisher, which betrayed Pauline as a quasi self-publication by an unknown poet who was as yet unable to sell his work to a reputable publisher. Peterson's analysis thus lucidly exposes the difficult balancing act between aspiration and reality in the poet's early career.

Alison Chapman devotes her essay to the frequently anthologized "Home Thoughts, from Abroad," which is too easily misunderstood as the poet's genuine expression of homesickness. She reads the poem instead as a parodic exploration of the relationship between distance/proximity and voice. Chapman shows that the poem actually satirizes the speaker's nostalgic patriotism which idealizes the home country because it is out of reach. Adapting Mary Louise Pratt's postcolonial concept of "contact zones" to the poem's European context, she suggests that the text makes an implicit argument for the engagement with the foreign, an engagement the speaker ultimately rejects. This self-critique is mirrored on the level of form by the poem's parody of the Romantic lyric. Browning exposes the genre's false claims to authenticity and presence, its solipsism and its pastoral escapism which fail to acknowledge the social realities of the hungry forties. Chapman's attention to the poem's placement in various contexts--its grouping with other poems on its first publication, EBB's critique of it in the correspondence, and its (now erased) manuscript version in an Italian book--reveals an intricate network of ironies in this apparently so straightforward poem.

Adrienne Munich's essay written with Nicole Garret takes us to the relatively neglected "Christmas-Eve," analyzing it as a poem in the apocalyptic genre both as "revelation"/"unveiling" and as related to the biblical book of Revelation. Focusing on elusive details such as the lamp in the dissenting chapel's vestibule and the hymn that is sung at the end of the poem, the essay discovers in the poem irony in the etymological sense of "disguised utterance," a kind of irony that would have been familiar to Victorian biblical exegetes. Munich and Garret relate "Christmas-Eve" to the medieval genres of the dream vision and the meditation on the face of the divinity and also to Browning's personal experience and poetics. As the discussion of the face of Christ in the poem reveals, this is an intriguingly named "poetics of the feet." Yet far from presenting "Christmas-Eve" as an exercise in medievalism which only addressed the Victorians' spiritual crisis, they suggest that the poem's apocalyptic form also invites reflection on the contemporary social crisis in Britain. Publishing his poem in 1850, at a time of widespread social deprivation and in the wake of the 1848 European revolutions, Browning proves to be highly conscious of the problems brought about by industrialization.

The next two essays focus on Browning's central monologue collection, Men and Women. Continuing the emphasis on contemporary politics in the poet's work, Stefan Hawlin places Men and Women in the historical context of the 1848 revolutions, disclosing the "political unconscious" in a variety of apparently apolitical poems from the collection. He draws on the recently published volumes of The Brownings' Correspondence to trace how Browning's views on politics are encoded in the poems. Elaborating John Woolford's claim that Browning displaces the discussion of politics onto other discourses, Hawlin reads poems which seem to celebrate love as escapism (such as "Love Among the Ruins" and "A Lovers' Quarrel") as containing hidden judgments of contemporary political events, including Louis Napoleon's aggressive version of empire. Hawlin's close reading of "Respectability" illustrates compellingly how "real" politics and sexual politics are intertwined in a poem that requires close familiarity with Browning's interest in contemporary events in Paris. Browning's use of Renaissance settings in Men and Women to discuss Victorian issues is well known, but Hawlin specifies the underlying ideology in these texts, arguing that these poems exemplify Browning's politico-religious celebration of the Renaissance as a period of Protestant enlightenment and liberty in resistance to political and religious authoritarianism.

On more familiar territory, Erik Gray revisits the two key themes of art and love in Men and Women, arguing that the collection is Browning's comparative exploration of the virtues and limitations of the different arts, in particular their ability to express love. Intriguingly, as Gray demonstrates, not all poems rate painting, music, sculpture, architecture, and poetry in the same way. Gray also traces a development within the collection from an antithetical relation between art and eros to the statement that the two resemble each other through their alternation between self-consciousness and unselfconsciousness and their typically Browningesque, paradoxical principle of succeeding through imperfection. Gray even detects this analogy in the semantic field of love that is deployed to discuss art in the "Essay on Shelley." Men and Women thus appears as a complex web of texts in which the different arts and love are conceptually intertwined to align Browning's notion of love with his aesthetics of the imperfect.

No essay collection on Browning would be complete without a fresh look at the origins of his dramatic monologue. Erin Nerstad takes on this challenge, arguing that the roots of his poetics of sympathy and judgment (as defined by Robert Langbaum) need to be sought in the religious hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher and his followers such as Browning's friend Benjamin Jowett. Both Browning and Schleiermacher are acutely conscious of how difficult it is to recover historical "truth." Nerstad identifies the similarity between the German's injunction to interpreters of biblical texts to use their imagination, placing themselves in the position of the biblical authors, and Browning's concept of the subjective poet as taking a perspective from within the person viewed. She then analyzes Browning's engagement with higher criticism in "A Death in the Desert" and in the first book of The Ring and the Book. The necessity for poet and reader to embody the speaker of the dramatic monologue imaginatively as theorized and illustrated by these poems parallels the sympathetic self-projection of the Schleiermacherian critic.

Moving to the late poems, John Woolford examines "The Genesis of Balaustion's Adventure," and uncovers the poem's role an as intervention in the nineteenth-century debate about the value of Euripides, whom both Brownings admired so much. Woolford reads Balaustion as an intertextual response to treatments of the Alcestis plot by Francis Turner Palgrave and William Morris. Browning's poem is balanced between a critique of how the other two poets have rejected Euripides' version of the myth and a tribute to both through verbal echoes. On the level of Browning's personal poetics, Woolford teases out the hidden importance of Balaustion, which both Browning himself and his critics treat as a minor text. Through a further intertextual dialogue, this time with Plato and Longinus, the poem makes the Romantic case for poetry as creative invention which can trigger creativity in the reader, as it does in the case of Euripides' reader Balaustion. Balaustion's Adventure thus contradicts the much more famous positivist celebration of factuality in The Ring and the Book, whose publication immediately precedes it.

The final two essays consider Browning's influence on two major poets of the next generation, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. Linda Shires argues that Hardy's "personative" lyric is indebted to different aspects of Browning's poetics, ranging from his ironic distancing to his use of verbal pauses and interrupted syntax. She shows how Hardy develops Browning's evocation of dramatic speech to give the reader the impression of following the speaker's thought. Hardy, whose characters live in a world without providence, of course abandons much that is central to the optimistic Browning, such as the underlying complicity of author and reader in their moral judgment of the speaker and the older poet's reliance on Christian values. While Browning presents extraordinary characters speaking in extreme situations, challenging the reader to judge the characters within an established moral framework, Hardy's speakers are ordinary men who invite the reader not to take sides but to reflect on more general patterns of self-deception. Hardy's Browning is full of trust in the certainties and poetic authority, and Hardy rejects this Browning. But, as Shires demonstrates, this rejection is balanced by a significant formal debt.

Kipling's work displays a still more obvious debt to Browning's impersonal poetry than Hardy's. U. C. Knoepflmacher charts Kipling's changing attitudes towards his predecessor in a wide range of poetic and prose texts, mapping out three phases in this lifelong relationship. In the juvenilia of the self-styled "latter-day Lippo Lippi," Knoepflmacher examines the adolescent Kipling's imitations and parodies of Browning, which already display his interest in reversing the older poet's work while at the same time using the latter's method of ironic self-concealment. Knoepflmacher traces how during Kipling's years as a young journalist in India the themes of many major monologues by Browning are adapted to Indian settings. In his complex rewriting of "Bishop Blougram," for instance, Kipling reflects on his own development by dramatizing it as a dialogue between a former self as Gigadibs and a mature self similar to Blougram. Recalling Hardy's transformation of Browning's extraordinary speakers into the lyrics of everyman, the later Kipling translates Browning's dramatic speakers into strikingly contemporary settings, replacing the historically distanced Bishop of Saint Praxed, the grammarian, and Childe Roland with a capitalist, a ship's engineer, and a motorcar driver. Knoepflmacher demonstrates how Kipling's continuing debt to Browning's dramatic and juxtaposed voices co-exists with the maturing writer's gradual distancing from Browning's ideas and settings.

If we can lay claim to representing something of the Browning scholarship of the bicentenary year, the figure that emerges from our nine essays is not the Browning who is part of a multimediated culture as anticipated by some members of our roundtable discussion. This focus on reading in our essays may be evidence that a key appeal of Browning, even in the age of media as described by our roundtablers, is his challenging and complex textuality. Going beyond the text, we do, however, gain some fascinating insights about textual mediation, through Chapman's attention to the material condition of Browning's manuscript and Peterson's examination of the publishing options available to the young poet.

Above all, the Browning of this issue is a poet who is acutely conscious of his social and political context, as we can see from the focus on politics both British and European of the 1840s and early 1850s in the essays by Munich and Garret, Chapman and Hawlin. These analyses make strong cases for Browning's engagement with social issues. Such arguments may not be necessary to convince Victorian poetry specialists of the genre's social relevance, which is not always as openly displayed as in the contemporary novel; but they might open the eyes of some more generalist readers. Browning's immersion in contemporary religious debates is once more highlighted by Munich and Garret's and Nerstad's essays, while Gray's analysis bears witness to Browning's serious engagement with centuries-long debates about aesthetics. Peterson and Woolford in particular demonstrate Browning's critical and appreciative reading of both contemporary and historical authors, to whom he alludes in formulating his own poetics and self-image. Here, as in Hawlin's essay, we see the benefits derived from the excellent ongoing editorial work on Browning's poetry and correspondence. Given that the Oxford University Press and Longman editions still have some way to go before completion, we can look forward to more research on sources and context providing fruitful material for critical essays.

Another important emphasis of our essays is Browning's use of genre. Langbaum still looms large as a point of reference here. We have moved on from formalist attempts to define the genre, but interesting new perspectives are offered on Browning's critique of the Romantic lyric and its use of the vocative in Chapman's analysis and on the reader's reliance on sympathetic projection as argued by Nerstad. These analyses prove that close attention to individual poems yields novel insights into the poet's use of dramatic voice. While feminist critics have long challenged the outdated claim that Browning and Tennyson invented the dramatic monologue, the essays by Shires and Knoepflmacher demonstrate the important influence of Browning as the foremost practitioner of the genre on later forms of poetry that play to varying degrees with a distance between poet and speaker.

We hope that readers will find the essays in this volume as stimulating as we did and that, like us, having read these acute analyses, they will want to revisit the rich, ironic, and intellectually challenging oeuvre of this ever-fascinating poet.

(Britta Martens / University of the West of England)

Notes

(1) Unless otherwise noted, citations Browning's poetry are taken from Robert Browning: Selected Poems, ed. Daniel Karlin, John Woolford, and Joseph Phelan (New York: Longman, 2010), p.11.

(2) The Ring and the Book, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Richard D. Altick (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001)

(3) Herbert Tucker, Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1980).

(4) Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse, 1790-1910 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).

(5) Robert Browning, letter to George Goodin Moulton-Barrett, February 4, 1852, The Brownings' Correspondence, http://www.browningguide.org/letters/VOL18/52019.00. htm. All quotations are from this letter.

(6) See Herbert Tucker, Epic; Yopie Prins, "Robert Browning, Transported by Meter" in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith L. McGill (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 205-230; Daniel Karlin, "Tennyson, Browning, Virgil" (pp. 95-114) and Donald S. Hair, "'Brother-Poets': Tennyson and Browning" (pp. 199-212) in Tennyson among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009).