BROWNING, ROBERT. - English poet, b. at Camberwell on 17 May 1812, d. at Venice on 12 December 1889. A multiform and emotional spirit, he tempered the happiness of life with the torment of art, in an expressive quest that anticipates its times. A nomad of culture, he explored, in order to sing of them, obscure regions of history, as he loved to make unexpected incisions into consciences and to travel the world in body, from St. Petersburg to Italy, «his only university» and often a source of inspiration (he dwelt for a long time in Florence with his wife Elizabeth Barrett and was among the first discoverers of the enchantment of Venice). His inner restlessness also fed the technical daring of his poetics, with which he sought to react against the literary milieu and which at times grows turbid in a sumptuous apparatus of images, rhymes and periphrases that disorient the reader.
Just as his thought remained substantially bourgeois, though ideally eroticized according to Carlylean molds, so too his cosmic and human vision was refracted in a picturesqueness of Mediterranean intensity. Sturdy in times when science was beginning its assaults on faith, B., who had inherited from his mother an intimately religious nature and a firm moral structure, felt the need for a spiritual ascent which, begun on earth above every positivist barrier, is prolonged into the afterlife, up to God; and he regarded earthly life as a training in good, a vestibule of eternity, a trial in which even sin and error are means of spiritual refinement. Even art and love draw reverberations from this conception: the one understood as a sublimation of narrow worldly reality into lights of a higher truth, with an assiduous projection of the real onto the ideal; the other raised to a symbol of universal love and therefore sung with an almost constant removal of sensual residues. This inner attitude of B. cannot but be illumined with Christian lights: a Christianity, however, that is sentimental rather than dogmatic; a yearning, rather than an arrival.
Moreover, the religious problematic is more or less present throughout B.'s work, which, after a philosophical phase (Pauline, 1833; Paracelsus, 1835; Sordello, 1840) and a dramatic one (Strafford, 1837; Pippa Passes, 1841; etc.), culminates in the affirmations of his maturity (Dramatic Lyrics, 1842; Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1843; Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 1850; Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Personae, 1864; The Ring and The Book, 1868-69), and then falls back into the analysis, not free of mannerism and enfeebled in style, of his last productions.
A scrutinizer of solitary souls, B. was less successful in the theater, establishing himself instead as a supreme artificer of dramatic monologues. A distinguished proof of this is his masterpiece, the aforementioned The Ring and The Book, in which the chronicle of the murder of a young woman (Pompilia) and of her lover (Caponsacchi) at the hands of her husband Guido, in papal Rome of the 17th century, is reflected in the psychological mirror of the various actors and witnesses of the affair. The long poem, despite its unevenness, remains one of the highest voices of 19th-century European poetry.