BROWNING, ROBERT. — English poet, born in Camberwell on 17 May 1812, died in Venice on 12 December 1889. A multifaceted and emotional spirit, he tempered the happiness of life with the torment of art, in an expressive quest that anticipated its time. A nomad of culture, he explored, in order to sing of them, obscure regions of history, just as he loved to practise unexpected dissections of consciences and to traverse the world in person, from St Petersburg to Italy, “his only university” and often a source of inspiration (he lived 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 nourished the technical daring of his poetics, with which he sought to react against the literary milieu, and which at times becomes clouded by a sumptuous apparatus of images, rhymes, and periphrases that disorient the reader.
Just as his thought remained essentially bourgeois, even though ideally eroticized according to Carlylean moulds, so his cosmic and human vision was refracted into a picturesque mode of Mediterranean intensity. Having lived in an age when science was beginning its assaults upon faith, B., who had inherited from his mother an intimately religious disposition and a firm moral structure, felt the need for a spiritual ascent which, begun on earth above every positivist barrier, should continue into the hereafter, all the way to God; and he regarded earthly life as training in goodness, the vestibule of eternity, a trial in which sin and error too are means of spiritual refinement. Even art and love derive their radiance from this conception: the former understood as the sublimation of narrow worldly reality into the lights of a higher truth, through the continual projection of the real onto the ideal; the latter elevated into a symbol of universal love and therefore sung with the almost constant removal of sensual remnants. This inner attitude of B. cannot fail to be illuminated by Christian lights: Christianity, however, sentimental rather than dogmatic; aspiration, more than arrival.
Moreover, the religious problematic is present, to a greater or lesser degree, 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 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), before later turning back to the analysis— not free from mannerism and stylistically enfeebled—of his final productions.
A scrutinizer of solitary souls, B. was less successful in the theatre, while establishing himself instead as a supreme craftsman of dramatic monologues. His masterpiece, the aforementioned The Ring and The Book, is an outstanding example: in it, the chronicle of the murder of a young woman (Pompilia) and her lover (Caponsacchi) at the hands of her husband Guido, in seventeenth-century papal Rome, is reflected in the psychological mirror of the various participants and witnesses of the affair. Despite its inequalities, the long poem remains one of the highest voices of nineteenth-century European poetry.