Robert Browning. (Guide to the Year's Work).

Gibson, Mary Ellis

This year's writing on Robert Browning might take as its motto "accents uncertain." The two books and various articles I discuss here focus on the uncertainties of literary reputation, on the complexities of Browning's meter and language, and on the difficulties of literary inheritance. The articles show a renewed interest in language and meter among readers of Browning as well as a continuing interest in Browning's role as a precursor of modernism.

The two longer studies published this year are books in series. Stefan Hawlin's admirable Complete Critical Guide to Robert Browning appears in the Routledge Critical Guide Series (London, 2002). Sarah Wood's Robert Browning: A Literary Life appears in the Palgrave series of literary lives (New York, 2001). This coincidence further confirms that the market for monographs is increasingly shaped by the reluctance of university presses to take on single-author studies. Stefan Hawlin negotiates the somewhat procrustean form of the Routledge series with considerable ease. I could not but feel that Sarah Wood was fettered by the notion of the "literary life" in her negotiation of the relation between biographical and critical questions.

Hawlin's critical guide, following Routledge's formula, is divided into three sections, "Life and Contexts," "Work," and "Criticism." The goal of the series is to introduce the central issues driving recent criticism of major authors and at the same time to provide an introduction to the author's life and work for readers encountering an author for the first time. Hawlin meets these demands with considerable dexterity. The reader may feel it a bit repetitive to find criticism of Browning's major poems discussed in the "work" section and addressed again in the survey of "criticism." I would imagine, though, that the typical reader of Hawlin's book will use it as a tool--prowling from the index to appropriate sections and scanning the overview of criticism in part three. Though the format inevitably requires some "doubling back," all three sections contribute significantly to our understanding of Browning and his critics.

The series editors propose that each Routledge critical guide should present a variety of critical responses and invite readers to supply their own interpretations. Happily, Hawlin both furthers and complicates this strategy. He has developed his own approach to Browning and is perfectly willing to elaborate his own interpretations, taking clear positions on a variety of critical issues. His interpretations of Men and Women or The Ring and the Book define the territory staked out by Browning's other critics while unabashedly putting forward a particular view. Indeed, I see affinities between Hawlin's approach to Browning and those of Daniel Karlin and Isobel Armstrong. Like Karlin, Hawlin is interested in Browning's loves and hatreds; like Armstrong, he provides a nuanced understanding of the connections between Browning's poetry and his politics. Hawlin makes the demands of the critical overview work for him, providing capacious but useful ways of viewing the major trends in Browning's long career.

Hawlin's reading of Men and Women is a case in point. He argues that in Men and Women, Browning's ironies are more subtle and more generous than in earlier monologues and that the volume as a whole reflects Browning's disillusionment with politics and engagement with more intimate matters of art and love. Hawlin characterizes Browning's volumes as a product of the "disillusioned aftermath of the 1848 revolutions," written in the "pessimism that a liberal like Browning naturally felt in the wake of those crucial eruptions and the conservative restorations that followed them" (p. 82). In this context of political disillusionment, Men and Women "explores a subjective, literary, inner world focused on the intimacies of love" (p. 81). These threads combine in Hawlin's exploration of "Fra Lippo Lippi," which he regards, with good reason, as the central poem of Browning's volumes. Hawlin reads "Lippi," for all its Protestant sensibilities, as Browning's attack on "bourgeois moralism" (pp. 86-87). Virtue, art, and re ligion in Men and Women can be judged by their quality of intensity. Hence for Hawlin, "The Statue and the Bust," like "Lippi," is a key poem. Deferral is not virtue. Instead, Hawlin argues, virtue for Browning "is a passionate love-affair with goodness and with the good god: it is not false inhibition of the spirit, a playing safe with a set of rules. Had the couple run off together and committed adultery, they might--even through sin--have discovered something real about their lives. As it was, their ennui was a consequence of timidity and convention, bourgeois moralism and compromise-something very different from the integrity of real virtue. We may notice, here, how the ideal of the intensity of virtue matches Browning's ideas about intensity in art" (pp. 93-94).

Another kind of intensity is offered in Hawlin's reading of "Childe Roland." This piece, Hawlin argues, seems "to imitate the myth-like intensity of some of the great romantic poems" (p. 94). While never simplifying, Hawlin argues for Browning's poetic wasteland as a "covertly political" depiction of the "alienated liberal imagination questing on through the wasteland of politics created in the wake of the conservative reaction to 1848" (p. 95). If we think of David Erdman's not dissimilar reading, Hawlin's has a persuasive force. Having treated poems centrally concerned with art, myth, and religion, Hawlin turns more directly to the love poems of Men and Women. And here as in his reading of Browning generally, he attends to the nature of sensual experience in Browning's work, offering an especially persuasive reading of "By the Fire-side." "By the Fire-side" exhibits "pleasure and playfulness," a world in which "images of life and death jostle together in accord with the larger meaning of the poem: that the moment of love in autumn ... gives meaning to a whole life, salving the inevitable 'autumn' of age and diminishment" (p. 98).

As one might expect from the coeditor of the Oxford edition of The Ring and the Book, Hawlin's discussion of Browning's longest poem is succinct and rich with insights. It will provide a fine introduction for students who have not (or will not) read all twelve books of Browning's magnum opus. Having canvassed the problems of history and interpretation in the poem, Hawlin concludes that Browning shows us a society "ruthlessly stratified in class terms, filled with corrupt aristocrats and their hangers-on, with self-serving and worldly bishops and archbishops. It is a society where 'birth and breeding' are everything and women are traded in marriage. In these circumstances Pompilia and Caponsacchi's actions, normal as they are in moral terms, enact a kind of revolution, a brilliant and moving recovery of emotional and spiritual norms" (p. 114). Given his restricted space--the whole volume comprises just over 200 pages--Hawlin's treatment of the late poems is quite brief. For the non-specialist, however, Hawlin' s discussion of recent decades in criticism and his larger approach to the poet's canon provide excellent points of departure.

Sarah Wood, working within relatively similar limitations, has attempted a rather different kind of broad critical overview. I could not help feeling her work was constrained by the need to write a "literary life." Really, this is not Wood's key interest--rather she is engaged in what I might call a study of intertextuality of a particular kind. Each chapter of Wood's volume focuses primarily on a significant literary relationship--one developed in person, in writing, or more often in both personal and textual encounters. Thus Wood focuses on Browning's connections to Mill, to the reviewers of Sordello, to Macready, to Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold, and to his publishers. This approach requires her to cut a very broad swath, particularly since the mandate of this series is to provide a comprehensive interpretation of a writer's life and work. The result is a somewhat circular structure to the volume, to chapters, and even to individual sections, which makes Wood's arguments particularly resistant to interpretat ion and summary.

Underlying Wood's intertextual readings would appear to be an argument about Browning and shades, shadows, or ghosts. His symbols, his invocation of past poets--Shelley in particular--the responses of readers, most symptomatically Henry James, all seem to suggest a kind of proto-modernism that makes Browning the legatee of his reader, who, oddly absorbed into the text, can be said to predecease him (p. 2). This is a clever argument, but difficult to sustain through readings of the poems. And it makes it more appropriate to view Wood's volume as a literary death rather than a literary life. Various chapters bow to developmental arguments, but Wood's organization resists chronology. Indeed Wood's literary biography proper is less nuanced than her close readings of poems. It is hard to imagine how, despite his employment in the Bank of England, one could refer to the "unbookish" occupations of Browning's father (p. 21), and it is equally hard to credit the generalization which Wood herself modifies very signific antly, that Browning "did not seem concerned about the mental agony of composition or the misery of getting uncomprehending reviews" (p. 26). Surely Browning never exhibited Tennyson's famous hypersensitivity to negative criticism, but his frequent correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett on the subject of "headaches" make it evident that composition and reception had an immediate and visceral impact. Both poets seemed to understand this bodily angst as Robert's "mental agony of composition."

The strengths of Wood's study are her insights into individual poems. Her treatment of Browning and Shelley is provocative, particularly as Shelley appears and reappears in Pauline, Sordello, and The Ring and the Book. Shelley becomes a crucial presence among Browning's ghosts, and Wood argues that he is nicknamed and renamed many times in the course of Browning's life. This naming becomes one of what Wood characterizes as Browning's "signature-effects" (see pp. 74-75). Permutations on Shelley's name, images of gold hair, of honey, and of language "oozing" into sight all create a curious complex of language and imagery. While some of these associations may be a stretch for some readers, Wood's articulation of the complex connections over multiple poems provides a nove--and often persuasive--approach to the emotional core of the poems. In getting at the emotional tenor of the poems Wood's discussion of Browning's violence is also effective. She returns us to the truly violent content of The Ring and the Book a nd Sordello, and more unusually brings these poems into comparison with less often treated monologues like "The Laboratory." Wood is especially persuasive in her reading of history and translation in The Ring and the Book, a reading that recognizes the poem's essential violence. She argues that Browning differs significantly from Arnold in his understanding of translation and history. Translation, for all its disjunctions, can in Arnold's view bring us close to truth. For Browning both history and translation entail "forgetting and lying, feeling and loving" (p. 176). In The Ring and the Book, historical translation has a violent effect on readers.

In her final chapter, Wood creates a brief chronology of the literary life, sketching Browning's relationship to his publishers over the course of a long career. While all these details are available elsewhere, for instance in John Maynard's Browning's Youth or in Park Honan and William Irvine's The Ring, the Book and the Poet (which are scarcely mentioned), the chapter provides a useful retrospective.

It is unfortunate that the Palgrave series does not include a separate bibliography, which would be particularly helpful to beginning students. The Routledge series, however, does make room for bibliography, and Hawlin has provided a comprehensive and thoroughly up-to-date summation of Browning criticism. While Wood's literary life hews closely to published letters and other nineteenth-century texts and integrates little of recent critical scholarship into its readings of particular poems, Hawlin's overview, though necessarily lighter on Victorian intertextuality, provides the non-specialist with a reliable guide to recent theoretical approaches to Victorian poetry.

This year's articles on Browning confirm Hawlin's insight that Browning's critics have generally learned much from each other and have "kept faith with ideas of biography, context, and the category of the aesthetic in ways that anticipate the present turning of the critical tide" (p. 127). This year saw a generally strong group of essays on Browning, and their concerns were primarily with issues of literary influence and intertextuality and with questions of language and meter. Perhaps the return to metrics is the most striking feature of this year's work, and perhaps Hawlin is right that such moves mark a return to the aesthetic as a positive focus. The most aesthetically demanding (and I have argued elsewhere aesthetically influential) of Browning's poems was certainly Sordello. This year saw the publication of three different treatments of Browning's poem--two essays on Browning and Pound and one on Browning and Don Quixote.

The most substantial of these essays was Michaela Giesenkirchen's "'But Sordello, and My Sordello?': Pound and Browning's Epic" (Modernism/Modernity 8 [2001]: 623-642). Giesenkirchen revisits Browning's notion of the rag-bag as Pound transformed it into his own bag of tricks. She comments that Browning's rag-bag becomes "a metaphor for the technique [Pound] set out to develop: the collecting of luminous concretenesses from the poet's store of knowledge for the rag-and-bone-shop of modernity" (p. 624). She characterizes Pound's encounter with Browning as an act of remaking, not an attempt at exorcism. Giesenkirchen captures the complexity of Browning's and Pound's literary inheritances. She shows how Sordello itself suggests a "complex, transhistorical model of literary influence that anticipates Pound's." In Sordello, "the elder troubadour Eglamor is to Sordello what Shelley is to Browning, and eventually Browning to Pound. Dante and Shelley are to Browning's Sordello what Sordello is to the Purgatory and eve ntually Browning to The Cantos, a ghost conjured up fleetingly, but whose work offers itself throughout for use and revision to the present poet" (p. 629). The range of these connections is manifest in the psychology of authorship as Pound's "untormented frankness" about his inheritance. In his famous letter to Rene Taupin about Browning, Pound declared, "Ich stamme aus Browning." Giesenkirchen credits Pound's German with a certain deliberateness; Pound's German might be read "I am from Browning." Rather than genealogy, we have geography. The poetic precursor "becomes a place of origin" and the poetic self "is thus constructed as geographical or textual, as divested of a fleshly or affective personality." Like Browning, Giesenkirchen argues, Pound "depicts himself as disembodied consciousness arising from and shaping a literary landscape" (p. 639).

The focus on the consciousness in and from landscape opens the way for the most valuable parts of Giesenkirchen's essay for readers of Browning. Her essay puts forward insightful readings of Sordello, Book 3, and a helpful picture of Browning's narrative experiments. As the poet encounters the pauper woman in Book 3 of Sordello his poetic problems are intensified: "The relationships among poetic vision, poetic work, and socio-political reality are even further complicated. Instead of unmasking the spectacle of Sordello's life, Browning's voice at last implies that an artificial dramatic hodge-podge offers a more reliable reality than any immediate present" (p. 631). The poet's position anticipates that of Sordello himself in Book 4, where the troubadour faces "the vicious circle of leaving isolation only to find himself more isolated" (p. 633). Here as elsewhere in this thorough essay, Giesenkirchen grounds her understanding of Pound's early cantos in a detailed and nuanced reading of Browning's poem.

When I turned from Giesenkirchen's study to Bill Freind's "'All Wandering as the Worst of Sinning': Don Juan and The Cantos" I could not help wondering whether Freind and Giesenkirchen were reading the same poem (Paideuma 29 [2000]: 111-131). Friend takes the contentious position that Byron's Don Juan "is more important to The Cantos than Browning's Sordello" (p. 111). Now as one who's written a book on the topic--and taken the opposite position--I confess my difficulty in accepting Freind's basic premise. That said, I am certain readers will find his treatment of closure in The Cantos and Don Juan of much interest and will gain from his treatment of improvisation in both poems. Less persuasively, to my mind, Friend attributes self-reflexiveness to Byron but not to Browning; he neglects the ways Byron influenced Browning and over-looks the self-reflexive Browning who appears in Sordello and in Giesenkirchen's essay.

A third, briefer treatment of Browning's Sordello and literary influence is Britta Martens' "Sordello, Don Quixote, and the 'Pointing-Pole"' (N&Q 49 [2002]: 62-63). Martens makes a persuasive case for Don Quixote as a precursor of Browning's supposed showman with pointing pole in Sordello. Her reading of the two texts together provides a new light for understanding Browning's narrator--even to his verbal tricks.

Yet a different kind of intertextuality is addressed in Charles LaPorte's "Sacred and Legendary Artists: Anna Jameson and Barrett Browning in the Hagiography of Pompilia" (VP 39 [2001]: 551-572). LaPorte's essay builds upon the work of Nina Auerbach, Tricia Lootens, and others who have addressed the canonization of Barrett Browning. LaPorte argues that the saint's life, retooled for Protestant audiences, significantly shapes Browning's choices in The Ring and the Book. Canonization takes on both its literary and religious meanings in this context, for Browning "witnessed how his wife's death had contributed to her already weighty status in Victorian poetic and religious legend, and he, more than any other person, helped shape his wife's legacy in the years after her death, accomplishing this largely through such works as Pompilia" (p. 553). In this monologue Browning manipulates "the generic authority of hagiography," especially the hagiography of virgin martyrs that was so important in the work of the Browni ngs' dear friend Anna Jameson. LaPorte shows in detail how Pompilia's monologue reworks the hagiographical conventions of virgin martyrdom and argues that Pompilia's rhetorical strategies depend upon "her tale's fantastic nature" (p. 557). The psychomachian logic of the virgin-martyr story allows Browning to establish Pompilia's purity--her innocence depends upon her opposition to Guido. There is, of course, the problem that the Higher Criticism and the force of Protestantism complicate the virgin martyr story. Thus, LaPorte argues, "Browning refuses to conceal the hand of the artist in this saintly creation, and the palpably constructed manner in which Pompilia's narrative inhabits the hagiographical genre serves to reveal the limits, as well as the reaches, of a generic self-defense" (p. 563). We are in the problematic world of "autohagiography." A short summary cannot do justice to the nuances of Laporte's argument, which neatly captures the tension between Browning's faith and his skepticism, his idealiz ation of his dead wife and his knowledge of the human propensity to create (saving?) fictions.

A final group of essays addresses the particulars of Browning's language. The failures of "A Grammarian's Funeral" are assessed by A. D. Nuttall in "Browning's Grammarian: Accents Uncertain" (EIC 51 [2001]: 86-100). Nuttall concludes ultimately that Browning's grammarian is a victim of paradox--or perhaps the poet is his own victim. The grammarian's apotheosis fails to convince because Browning goes beyond the simple "contrast between a life of vivid engagement with the physical world and the life of the mind" (p. 96). The life of the mind seems, in the grammarian's case, to have less life than at first meets the eye. Though he studies the "small words," the particles, Browning's grammarian lacks the Blakean ability to see the world in a grain of sand; hence the meter and particularly the hyperbolic language of the poem's conclusion falls flat. We sense, Nuttall argues, "that the poet is shouting to cover his own uncertainty" (p. 98).

Donald S. Hair takes on a similar set of concerns in his metrical study of Fifine at the Fair ("A Note on Meter, Music and Meaning in Robert Browning's Fifine at the Fair," VP 39 [2001]: 25-35). Hair offers a complex reading of the tensions within Browning's metric. In Browning's poem the reader can be aware of more than one possible voicing of the lines--more than one metrical pattern. The tension between the two patterns energizes the poem and appeals "to the reader's actual sensory experience of the lines." Browning links the reader's response with "the primal (and phallic) energy of the menhir Juan and Elvire see, and which Browning will link, even more daringly with the Word which is God" (p. 26). The poem itself combines "two basic patterns: the iambic hexameter line, and the four-stress line, here a line with four bars of syllables in the rhyme marking the beginning of the fourth bar" (p. 27). As in music each of the "bars" is isochronous, headed by a strong beat, but free as to number of syllables. Li ke its metrics, the poem's theme combines opposites: "Juan is torn between Elvire and Fifine, and between the opposing values associated with each. A self-described householder who conducts himself within social bounds, Juan is attracted by the anarchic energy of the fair" (p. 27). Hair's detailed reading of Browning's prosody allow him to explicate the physical instantiation of the poem's central mystery--the incarnational truth of "God, man, or both together mixed" (p. 33). Hair reads prosody in this too modestly self-described note as the sensual form of Browning's incarnational theology.

Nigel Fabb never attempts to draw such broad meanings from prosody; his interest in Browning's iambic penrameters is much more technical. In "Weak Monosyllables in Iambic Verse and the Communication of Metrical Form" (Lingua 111 [2001]: 771-790), he uses many examples from Browning's pentameter--and especially Browning's use of unstressed syllables--to argue for a new understanding of generative metrics (i.e., scansion based on rules derived in the same way that grammatical rules are derived in generative grammar). Like Hair, but for very different reasons, Fabb concludes that poetry--not just Browning's but metrical poetry generally--exhibits "two kinds of rhythmic, metrical form: the generated metrical form and the inferred metrical form." Or in layperson's terms the actual line and the "rhythmic template" (pp. 787-788). One source of regularity in metrical verse, Fabb argues, is in generative rules (whether the poet engages them consciously or not) required to instantiate a metrical pattern; the other sour ce is in the pragmatic principles that enable the recognition of literary form. Were Fabb inclined to take on Browning's hexameters, he might argue that Hair's theologically weighted paradox could just as well be described as Browning's tendency to push the edges of any metric in which he worked. Tension between the reader's pragmatic formal sense and the lines Browning generates creates, not a thematics of incarnation, so much as a particularly vivid variety of the aesthetic tension necessary to all metrical poetry.

In the non-linguists' treatments of Browning's form--whether it be metrical practice or genre--form and theology are mutually implicated. In the longer studies of literary inheritance and intertextuality reviewed here Browning retains his place as a precursor of modernist experimentation. Taken together, Browning's critics this year leave us with "accents uncertain." Do we stress God or man in the metrically ambiguous line from Fifine Hair so often quotes? Do we persist in reading theology as the limit of modernism? Is skepticism the undertow of hagiography?

MARY ELLIS GIBSON, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is author of History and the Prism of Art: Browning's Poetic Experiments (1987), editor of Critical Essays on Robert Browning (1992), and author of Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians (1995).