ROBERT BROWNING LIFE AND FACTS

ROBERT BROWNING LIFE 
           AND FACTS

• Robert Browning Facts. The English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889) 
• He is best known for his dramatic monologues.
• Robert Browningwas born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell, London .
• Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright who became famous during the Victorian era for his dramatic verses in poems and plays.
• His writing skills, imagination, and way of expression were highly influenced by his father’s experiences.
• His father was Robert Browning, Sr. and his mother was Sarah Anna Wiedemann, the daughter of a German ship-owner settled in Dundee in Scotland.She was also a talented musician. 
• Robert Browning started his writing career in 1830 but did not get much success during his initial days as a poet though he was supported whole heartedly by his family in accomplishing his objective.
• After mastering the art of writing dramatic monologues, he published his first long poem titled ‘Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession’ in March 1833 which caught the attention of Dante Gabriel Rosetti.
• It was followed by the poem ‘Paracelsus’ in 1835 based on a visit to St. Petersburg in Russia, with the Russian Consul-General named Chevalier George de Benkhausen. 
• It received encouraging reviews from critics including Charles Dickens and William Wordsworth.
• This poem gave Browning an entry to the literary circle in London where he met actor William Macready who asked him to write verses for his stage plays.
•  The first play ‘Stafford’ was performed only five times while the second play written by him was not performed at all. The third play failed miserably bringing an end to the relationship between him and Macready.
• His next poem, ‘Sordello’, published in 1840, was thought to be too lengthy and obscure and affected the reviews of poems he later wrote even though they were much shorter.This poem significantly reduced his reputation as a poet from which it took him almost a decade to recover. To get back his earlier reputation he moved away from the style of writing followed by P. B. Shelley and adopted a personal style for the series of eight pamphlets titled ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ published during 1841 to 1846.
• His wife Elizabeth, who was older than him by six years, was a much more popular poet when he married her. During the happy years from 1846 to 1861 that he spent with his wife in Florence, Italy, he did not write much. His only work during that time was to dedicate his book of poems ‘Men and Women’ to her while she showed her love for him by presenting him with her book ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. Unfortunately, his wife died in 1861.
• He brought out ‘Collected Poems’ in 1862 and ‘Dramatis Personae’ in 1863 for which he received highly critical acclaim from the critics who were already highly sympathetic about the loss of his wife.‘
• The Ring and the Book’, a single poem stretched over 12 books and written during 1868-69 based on an old book describing a murder and trial in Rome,gained him a lot of popularity and he came to be known along with Alfred Tennyson as the two best poets during that period.
• Browning continued to write poems and plays for another twenty years,but it was the period during the late 1860s that he was able to reach his pinnacle of glory as a poet.
• As he went on writing, his influence in the literaryworld grew by leaps and bounds until his death in 1889 on the day his final volume of verses titled ‘Asolando’ got published. After his death he was regarded as a philosopher-poet whose poem ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ reflected the ‘theory of evolution’ as suggested by Charles Darwin .

•         Major work's
  
  
        Robert Browning is best known for the poem ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ which was very popular among children. It was published in the paper ‘Dramatic Lyrics’ in 1842.He himself did not regard this poem to be consequential at that time but it became popular later.
•     In 1862 he published ‘Collected Poems’ and in 1863 published ‘Dramatis Personae’ for which he received high praise. ‘Dramatis Personae’ has both a first and a second edition.
•       His popularity shot up with the book ‘The Ring and the Book’ which he wrote in 12 volumes and published during the period November 1868 to February 1869 after coming back to England.
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