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YouthRobert Browning was born in Camberwell, England, on May 7, 1812, the first son of Robert and Sarah Wiedemann Browning. His father was a man of fine intellect and equally fine character, who worked as a well-paid clerk in the Bank of England and so managed to amass a library of around 6,000 books — many of them highly obscure and arcane. Thus Robert was raised in a household with good literary resources. Through his mother he inherited some musical talent, and composed settings for various songs. His grandmother was also of Creole blood. Thomas Chase wrote of Browning's dark complexion skin, and his curly hair. The same went for his Jamaican English born wife, Elizabeth Barrett. Early careerImage:Robert Browning.jpg A younger Robert Browning
In 1834, he paid his first visit to Italy, in which so much of his future life was to be passed. In 1835, Browning wrote the lengthy dramatic poem Paracelsus, essentially a series of monologues spoken by the Swiss doctor and alchemist Paracelsus and his friends. Published under Browning's own name, in an edition financed by his father, the poem was a small commercial and critical success and gained the notice of Carlyle, Wordsworth, and other men of letters, giving him a reputation as a poet of distinguished promise. Around this time the young poet was very much in demand in literary circles for his ready wit and flamboyant sense of style, and he embarked upon two ill-considered ventures: a series of plays for the theatre, all of which were dismally unsuccessful and none of which are much remembered today, and Sordello, a very lengthy poem in rhymed pentameter and loosely drawing upon a historical character who also (briefly) appears in Dante's Divine Comedy. Set against the backdrop of the conflict between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, Sordello was already difficult to understand for a Victorian audience that was accustomed to the annotation in historical fiction. Browning's syntax, style and - perhaps most of all - his plot made an already confusing subject virtually incomprehensible and the young poet became the butt of a number of satirical quips, such as Mrs. Carlyle's celebrated comment that she had read the entire thing through without being able to work out whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book. The effect on Browning's career was catastrophic, and he would not recover his good public standing — and the good sales that accompanied it — until the publication of The Ring and the Book nearly thirty years later. Throughout the early 1840s he continued to publish volumes of plays and shorter poems, under the general series title Bells and Pomegranates. Although the plays, with the exception of Pippa Passes — in many ways more of a dramatic poem than an actual play — are almost entirely forgotten, the volumes of poetry (Dramatic Lyrics, first published in 1842, and 1845's Dramatic Romances and Lyrics) are often considered to be among the poet's best work, containing many of his most well-known poems. Though much admired now, the volumes were largely ignored at the time in the wake of the Sordello debacle. Marriage and major monologues
During this period Elizabeth published several major works: most notably Casa Guidi Windows, a long poem, and Aurora Leigh, a verse novel. Robert published a volume of theological poetry - Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day - and wrote the two volumes on which his reputation was principally to rest during the Twentieth Century: Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864). In these collections, Browning included many of the finest examples of the dramatic monologue, a form of poetry of which he and Tennyson were the principal pioneers and that was to exert a significant influence upon such later poets as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Amongst the canonical examples of this form are such among Browning's monologues of this period as: "Andrea del Sarto", "Fra Lippo Lippi", "Bishop Blougram's Apology", "A Death in the Desert", "Caliban upon Setebos" and "Mr. Sludge, "The Medium"". Although the period of his marriage was not a prolific one compared with Browning's youth or later life, it saw a steady rise in his reputation and produced some of his most enduring works.
Complete list of works[citation needed]
Timeline<timeline> ImageSize = width:450 height:450 PlotArea = left:50 right:0 bottom:10 top:10 DateFormat = yyyy Period = from:1810 till:1890 TimeAxis = orientation:vertical ScaleMajor = unit:year increment:5 start:1810 ScaleMinor = unit:year increment:1 start:1810 PlotData= color:red mark:(line,black) align:left fontsize:S shift:(25,0) # shift text to right side of bar # there is no automatic collision detection, fontsize:XS # so shift texts up or down manually to avoid overlap shift:(25,-10) at:1812 text:Born in Camberwell at:1835 text:Publishes Paracelsus at:1840 shift:(25,-5) text:Publishes Sordello at:1841 text:Publishes Bells and Pomegranates at:1846 text:Marries to Elizabeth Barrett from:1846 till:1861 text:Lives chiefly in Italy at:1861 text:Elizabeth dies; ~ Robert returns to England, continues to write at:1864 text:Publishes Dramatis Personae at:1869 text:Publishes The Ring and the Book at:1889 text:Publishes Asolando; dies. </timeline> See alsoReferences
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