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visionary expressions about a world that can be redeemed by poets who are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Early published poetry Yet it was not easy to break with Shelley. Browningʹs first act of exorcism occurred in Pauline; a Fragment of a Confession, composed late in 1832 and published anonymously by the firm of Saunders and Otley in March 1833, with the subsidy of £30 offered by a maternal aunt. In a kind of poetic autobiography, the speaker looks back over his past life in which he had deserted Pauline (who may have been inspired by Eliza Flower) and had foregone his inherited religious faith under the influence of the Sun‐treader (Shelley). At the end, expressing a willingness to submit to the world of limitations and not seek hereafter for a world in which he will know all, he embraces God, Pauline, and the Sun‐treader. Yet in the final verse paragraph it becomes clear that the poetʹs betrayal of Shelley the Sun‐treader is a greater source of remorse than his forswearing of his traditional religious faith. Reviews of Pauline were mixed, W. J. Fox praising it and others despising it as unintelligible. In February 1834 Browning took his first trip abroad: to St Petersburg at the invitation of the Russian consul‐ general to accompany him there. Browning was so fascinated by court life on this occasion that for a brief period he considered a diplomatic career. On his return to London he met in summer 1834 a young Frenchman, Count Amédée de Ripert‐Monclar (1807–1871), an aristocrat who loved art and literature and was in close touch with the cultural life of France. They became close friends, and their friendship lasted until the 1840s, when they seem to have drifted apart. Monclar was an important influence on Browning in many ways, and he even seems to have influenced Browningʹs poetic development, in that he was to suggest Paracelsus as the subject for an extended piece of verse (Orr, Life, 72). Browning began this poem early in October 1834, and completed it in mid‐March 1835. His father bore the expense of publication, and Paracelsus was published anonymously on 15 August 1835. Although its format is that of a play—it was divided into five scenes and contained four characters—the author claims in the preface that it is not a drama nor a dramatic poem, but that each scene presents Paracelsus at a critical moment of his inner life in which he is brought by an articulation of his ‘mood’ to new insights. In effect, the five scenes are five monologues, in the first of which Paracelsus begins as a Shelleyan visionary whose role is to encounter the divine and reveal the results to mankind. At the close he comprehends how his pursuit was misconceived, for he learns that the noumenal, even if partially touched by means of language, cannot be communicated to others through the phenomenal, which is language. The reviews of the poem were largely favourable, although the work did not gain the author a great deal of money. For a number of years thereafter the title‐pages of Browningʹs new works bore the legend ‘By the Author of Paracelsus’. In the mid‐1830s Browning was introduced to a number of literary figures through the agency of W. J. Fox. Although some of them (like Thomas Carlyle) found his dandyism in dress and manner off‐putting, they soon discerned beneath the foppish surface a serious though ironic personality. In May 1836 Browning attended a supper at which he was toasted by Francis Talfourd, the host, Walter Savage Landor, and Wordsworth. Of most immediate importance, however, was the fact that William Charles Macready, the actor and producer of plays, asked the young poet to write a play for him. Browningʹs Strafford was produced at Covent Garden on 1 May 1837, after some conflict with Macready and John Forster over its nature as a play. In the end, it ran for only five performances. It was not well received— apparently because, as the author said in the preface to the published play, his aim was ‘Action in Character rather than Character in Action’. Following his disappointment with the reception of Strafford, Browning visited Paris and in spring 1838 made a three‐month tour of Europe. For the previous four or five years he had been working on a long poem devoted to the Italian troubadour Sordello, but he was so taken with Italy that he was unable to finish the poem among the scenes described in it. Sordello was not published until March 1840, again at the expense of his father.
Browningʹs conception of the poem had changed several times and his intractable materials could not be fused into a harmonious union. But to the poet this was no drawback, for, in his opinion, conventional formal unity and logical coherence were attributes merely of poetry of the past. His aim was to be one of the setters‐forth of unexampled themes, Makers of quite new men. (Sordello, 1.26–7) This is why his speaker bids Shelley depart early on so that his poem, finally of approximately 5800 lines of rhymed couplets, can get down to business. Speaking in his own voice, the poet admits to a new kind of narrative presentation and to a new kind of genre (which mixed many genres). One of the chief characteristics of the poem that gives it its distinctive voice is parabasis: that is, the presence of digressions in which the author addresses the audience on personal or topical matters. After devoting six books often relating in a roundabout way to Sordello, in the end the narrator suggests that the real subject was not Sordello but rather the poet himself and his efforts to write the poem. Carefully ordered but appearing unstructured, purportedly historical but in fact deeply personal, generically indeterminate and stylistically complex, Sordello is unique in literary history. Bells and Pomegranates Browning believed that Sordello would make his reputation, but for the next two decades it had the opposite effect, as its critical reception was almost universally condemnatory. The poem ‘became notorious for its obscurity’, partly because Browning unreasonably assumed that his readers would be familiar with the thirteenth‐century Italian history that was key to its narrative structure. Even Elizabeth Barrett, who was soon publicly to praise the young poetʹs work, had difficulty with Sordello, and the confusion prevailed well into the modern era, with only Ezra Pound finding the poem ‘a model of lucidity’, and consequently being ‘probably the only person who has ever seriously claimed to have understood Sordello’ (Poems, 1.1040). Certainly in his own time, the work damaged the young poetʹs standing, and his publisher, Edward Moxon, attempted to redeem Browningʹs reputation (as well as his own), with the suggestion that his next poetry be printed in a series of inexpensive paper‐bound pamphlets, the cost to be borne by Browningʹs ever supportive father. Browning agreed and chose the general title Bells and Pomegranates hoping by this title to ‘indicate an endeavour towards something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought; which looks too ambitious, thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred’ (ibid., 1.1069). The eight pamphlets were to contain seven plays and two collections of poems and were published between April 1841 and April 1846. Pippa Passes (April 1841), the first number, contests Romantic notions of poetry as lyric effusion, a view summed up and advocated by J. S. Mill in two essays in 1833 in which he maintained that the greatest poetry is by nature soliloquy, not heard but overheard. In Pippa Passes, Browning presents a heroine whose key mode of utterance is lyric poetry overheard by others. The innocence and religiosity of Pippaʹs song which is inadvertently overheard by the various characters is crucial. As she sings famously at the beginning of the poem: Godʹs in his heaven— Allʹs right with the world! But all is emphatically not right in the world of Pippa Passes, and the overheard lyric acts as a commentary on the auditorsʹ situations, and acts on the characters to great effect, causing significant changes in their viewpoints and actions. In working out the implications of this mode of poetic utterance Browning showed that the poet has a dialogic relationship with the audience and a responsibility from which he or she cannot escape. In effect, in the four scenes Browning shows how poetry is theatre, or performance, before an interactive audience.
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