Category: Poetry
Parnassus, Apollo's mount, has two peaks, and on these, for sixty years, from 1830 to 1890,[1] two poets sat, till their right to these lofty peaks became unchallenged. Beneath them, during these years, on the lower knolls of the mount of song, many new poets sang; with divers...
Parnassus, Apollo's mount, has two peaks, and on these, for sixty years, from 1830 to 1890,[1] two poets sat, till their right to these lofty peaks became unchallenged. Beneath...
5. Chapter 5The theory of human life which Browning conceived, and which I attempted in the last chapter to explain out of _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, underlies the poems which have to do w...
2. Chapter 2It is a difficult task to explain or analyse the treatment of Nature by Browning. It is easy enough to point out his remarkable love of her colour, his vivid painting of brief l...
15. Chapter 15Among the women whom Browning made, Balaustion is the crown. So vivid is her presentation that she seems with us in our daily life. And she also fills the historical imagination.
4. Chapter 4To isolate Browning's view of Nature, and to leave it behind us, seemed advisable before speaking of his work as a poet of mankind. We can now enter freely on that which is most...
3. Chapter 3In the previous chapter, some of the statements made on Browning as a poet of Nature were not sufficiently illustrated; and there are other elements in his natural description w...
16. Chapter 16When Browning published _The Ring and the Book_, he was nearly fifty years old. All his powers (except those which create the lyric) are used therein with mastery; and the ease...
6. Chapter 6The period in which the poem of _Sordello_ opens is at the end of the first quarter of the thirteenth century, at the time when the Guelf cities allied themselves against the Gh...
8. Chapter 8Of the great poets who, not being born dramatists, have attempted to write dramas in poetry, Browning was the most persevering. I suppose that, being conscious of his remarkable...
12. Chapter 12The Imaginative Representations to be discussed in this chapter are those which belong to the time of the Renaissance. We take a great leap when we pass from Karshish and Cleon...
9. Chapter 9When we leave _Paracelsus_, _Sordello_ and the _Dramas_ behind, and find ourselves among the host of occasional poems contained in the _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Romances_, in _Men...
14. Chapter 14No modern poet has written of women with such variety as Browning. Coleridge, except in a few love-poems, scarcely touched them. Wordsworth did not get beyond the womanhood of t...
13. Chapter 13The first woman we meet in Browning's poetry is Pauline; a twofold person, exceedingly unlike the woman usually made by a young poet. She is not only the Pauline idealised and a...
11. Chapter 11All poems might be called "imaginative representations." But the class of poems in Browning's work to which I give that name stands apart. It includes such poems as _Cleon, Cali...
7. Chapter 7There are certain analogies between Browning as a poet and the Sordello of the poem; between his relation to the world of his time and that of Sordello to his time; and finally,...
17. Chapter 17A just appreciation of the work which Browning published after _The Ring and the Book_ is a difficult task. The poems are of various kinds, on widely separated subjects; and wit...
18. Chapter 18Two Volumes of Dramatic Idyls, one in 1879, the other in 1880, followed _La Saisiaz_ and _The Two Poets of Croisic_. These are also mixed books, composed, partly of studies of c...
10. Chapter 10The poems on which I have dwelt in the last chapter, though they are mainly concerned with love between the sexes, illustrate the other noble passions, all of which, such as joy...