Book Description
The Poetry of Robert Browning, by Stopford A. Brooke, author of "Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life" Contents: I. BROWNING AND TENNYSONII.THE TREATMENT OF NATUREIII. THE TREATMENT OF NATUREIV.BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE--PAULINE AND PARACELSUSV. THE POET OF ARTVI.SORDELLOVII. BROWNING AND SORDELLOVIII.THE DRAMASIX.POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVEX. THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVEXI.IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONSXII. IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS--RENAISSANCEXIII.WOMANHOOD IN BROWNINGXIV. WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING--(THE DRAMATIC LYRICS AND POMPILIA)XV.BALAUSTIONXVI. THE RING AND THE BOOKXVII.LATER POEMSXVIII. THE LAST POEMS ... Read more

Product Description
No date found on title page; Prefatory Note is dated 1887. Title on spine is "Mrs. Browning's Poetical Works." ... Read more

Book Description
Henry James described Browning's extended dramatic poem The Ring and the Book, over 20,000 lines in length, as `a great living thing', `a proportioned monstrous magnificence'. The story was developed from some old legal documents discovered by Browning concerning an actual murder which took place in Rome in 1698, and its writing was his major preoccupation in the 1860s, the early years of his widowerhood in London. This volume gives us the first third of the poems, Books I to IV. The Introduction draws on unpublished letters, journals, and working papers not examined by previous editors, to illuminate how the poem was conceived and researched, the range of people the poet consulted, and the five-year period of composition. The poem's complex publishing history is disentangled in the Text part of the Introduction, including a discussion of the corrections and revisions Browning made on sheets from volumes I, III, and IV of the second edition, which he later forgot and which never appeared in print. Appendix E gives these important variants in full. The annotation presents new contextual matter, including unpublished letters relating to `Lyric Love', Browning's famous invocation to his dead wife. The appendices give the original Italian text of Browning's second source, `Morte dell'Uxoricida Guido Franceschini Decapitato'; two previously unpublished autograph chronologies in which the poet worked out historical details of his story; and a new account of the biographical significance of the `Ring' image.The editors have made six substantive emendations to the text, ranging from inaccuracies in the original typesetting to changes made by Browning after publication. The evolution of the text from manuscript to copy text is also discussed, and an appendix is devoted to a set of corrected proofs preserved at Yale, a textual evolutionary dead end of great interest and significance. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Note on the Cambridge Edition of Browning
I just want to leave a note on the Cambridge Edition of Browning.The type is rather small and double column.It may be difficult for some people for extended reading.However, it is a large volume that includes everything as far as I know, so for the price it might be worth your while if you want to have all of Browning on hand. ... Read more

Product Description
Undated, circa 1872. Green cloth boards with gilt lettering and embossed black and white illustrations on spine and front cover. Top edge gilt. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
Do you see this Ring? 'Tis Rome-work, made to match (By Castellani's imitative craft) Etrurian circlets found, some happy morn, After a dropping April; found alive Spark-like 'mid unearthed slope-side figtree-roots.Download Description
Do you see this Ring? 'Tis Rome-work, made to match (By Castellani's imitative craft) Etrurian circlets found, some happy morn, After a dropping April; found alive Spark-like 'mid unearthed slope-side figtree-roots. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Awesome
I've just read some Amazon reviewers' responses to T. S. Eliot's poetry as testimony to his possibly being the greatest poet ever.Such an evaluation practically proves Eliot's insistent point about the cultural impoverishment of the present.

Indeed, Browning's masterwork may very well be the ultimate poetic epic in the English language, rivaled certainly not by Spenser, Wordsworth, and Pound but only by Chaucer and Milton.The fact that even the "trial of the century"--the O. J. Simpson case--did not produce widespread renewed interest in its literary predecessor and equivalent would produce surprise and disappointment were I not so aware that, outside of Shakespeare, the academic canon has been foreshortened (and engendered) to a tradition that begins with Virginia Woolf and ends with Sylvia Plath.

In "Ring and the Book" Browning takes the sordid event of an enraged husband murdering his helpless bride--the daughter of a prostitute and rescue project of a priest--to "explain the ways of God to man."The reader of the poem becomes, in effect, a "privileged" juror in the trial of the murderer, positioned through Browning's protean and powerful rhetoric within the consciousness of each of the principals before finally being enabled to glimpse the "truth" that affords meaning to human mutability and suffering.

The poem no doubt will remain in dust closets, largely unread even by literature Ph.D's.But there's little chance of its ever becoming lost.Like the priest-hero of the poem, a few priests of the imagination will ever so often make the poem's discovery and be lured into the quest of pursuing its singular meanings.

[A reader recently wrote asking me about this edition, which led to the discovery that Amazon often uses the same review for any and every edition!(Be careful about ordering used editions for the same reason.)I was referring to the Penguin edition, which is now out of print.Beware of the "Kessinger Edition," which is really no edition at all but a bootleg, an uncredited reprint.Moreover, it's the version that a search of the title is apt to take you to.You might try the Collins and Altick edition on Broadview.]

The unknown masterpeice of English literature
As an English major at the University of Pittsburgh, I was never exposed to this series of dramatic monologues. It's a pity, because when I finally stumbled across it, Browning went from being just another 19th-century poetto my favorite English language poet of them all, at one fell swoop. TheRing and the Book is based on a real-life murder trial in 17th centuryRome. The story is told from multiple perspectives, changing with every newsection of the book; we hear from the "Man on the Street", themurderer, the victim on her death-bed, and even the Pope. The details ofthe story are far too convoluted to explain in summary and do anythingresembling justice to the book, but it can be safely said that once you'vebegun, you're in for a whirlwind ride through a carnival of a trial thatmakes the O.J. Simpson affair look like a parking-ticket dispute bycomparison.The truly stand-out feature of The Ring and the Book is not inthe story itself, however, but in the telling. Browning handles the Englishlanguage like a virtuoso emulating angel's choruses on a Stradivarius. Ifthe book suffers any single flaw, it is the simple fact that at times,Browning writes these lines almost TOO well, making it difficult for thereader to pay attention to the actually progression of the story, as saidreader becomes entraced by the beauty of the poetry. (In particular, Iconsider Caponsacchi's description of the flight from Arezzo beginning atline 1152 of Book VI to be one of the best written passages in literatureof all time.)Dramatic blank verse hasn't seen genius of this levelsince Milton wrote of the angelic Fall. It's a pity this book isn't morewidely recognized and discussed, for it deserves recognition as one of thebest-constructed poetic stories of history, and the pinnacle of 19thcentury authorship. ... Read more

Book Description
Through his innovations in poetry, especially the dramatic monologue, Robert Browning became among the most important poets of his time and a tremendous influence on twentieth-century poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.He is one of the most studied poets of the nineteenth-century and a key figure in Victorian literature or introduction to poetry courses.This comprehensive introduction is the ideal reference for students. ... Read more

Book Description
Selected and edited by Franklin Baker ... Read more