His and Hers

Matthew Reynolds

• BuyThe Poems of Robert Browning, Vol. III: 1847-61 edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan
  Longman, 753 pp, £100.00, November 2007, ISBN 978 0 582 08453 7

Browning’s contemporaries agreed he was a genius, but they were not all sure he was a poet. Wilde’s quip – ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning’ – expresses a view shared by admirers such as George Eliot and Henry James, doubters like Carlyle and Hopkins, and a chorus of others. But the history of poetry is a history of revolutions in what counts as poetry. Today, Browning’s density, his chattiness, his specificity, his preference for dramatic and narrative forms, even the undisciplined sprawl of his vocabulary wouldn’t be reasons to disqualify him as a poet. And yet that old idea still matters, because his divergence from what people most expected of poetry was at the root, not only of the now unread long works in verse, but also of the intense monologues that have become fixtures of anthologies and syllabuses.