An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry by Robert Browning
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page 52 of 525 (09%)
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some at least of the many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study
and discussion of his works, and the publication of papers on them, and extracts from works illustrating them" has already contributed much towards paying a long-standing debt. Mr. Browning's earliest poems, `Pauline' (he calls it in the preface to the reprint of it in 1868 "a boyish work", though it exhibits the great basal thought of all his subsequent poetry), was published in 1833, since which time he has produced the largest body of poetry produced by any one poet in English literature; and the range of thought and passion which it exhibits is greater than that of any other poet, without a single exception, since the days of Shakespeare. And he is the most like Shakespeare in his deep interest in human nature in all its varieties of good and evil. Though endowed with a powerful, subtle, and restless intellect, he has throughout his voluminous poetry made the strongest protest that has been made in these days against mere intellect. And his poetry has, therefore, a peculiar value in an age like the present -- an age exhibiting "a condition of humanity which has thrown itself wholly on its intellect and its genius in physics, and has done marvels in material science and invention, but at the expense of the interior divinity." It is the human heart, that is, the intuitive, the non-discursive side of man, with its hopes and its prophetic aspirations, as opposed to the analytic, the discursive understanding, which is to him a subject of the deepest and most scrutinizing interest. He knows that its deepest depths are "deeper than did ever plummet sound"; but he also knows that it is in these depths that life's greatest secrets must be sought. The philosophies excogitated |
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