Poetry · 1886
An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning’s Poetry
Hiram Corson taught English literature at Cornell for over three decades, and this book distills what he thought students most needed before they could actually read Browning — a poet whose reputation, in Corson's own time, was still split between readers convinced he was a genius and readers convinced he was simply obscure. The book works through Browning's method poem by poem, arguing that the difficulty is deliberate and rewards patience rather than punishing it, and reproduces a number of the poems themselves in full, with Corson's own line-by-line notes and commentary.
Corson first published the book in 1886, at the height of the Browning Society movement that had sprung up on both sides of the Atlantic to make exactly this kind of case for him; this text reflects the expanded third edition, which added a full annotated text of "A Death in the Desert" not long after Browning's death in 1889.
Bibliomancer publishes the text exactly as Hiram Corson wrote it.
Contents
- Introductory
- Preface
- Note to the Second Edition
- Note to the Third Edition
- Epigraph
- Poems
- Introduction
- Popularity
- II — The Idea of Personality and of Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality, as Embodied in Browning’s Poetry
- III — Mr. Browning’s “Obscurity”
- IV — Browning’s Verse
- V. Arguments of the Poems
- An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
- Wanting is—What?
- My Star
- The Flight of the Duchess
- The Last Ride Together
- Amphibian
- James Lee’s Wife
- Epilogue to ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’
- Confessions
- Respectability
- Home Thoughts, from Abroad
- Old Pictures in Florence
- Fra Lippo Lippi
- A Face
- A Toccata of Galuppi’s
- Memorabilia
- How it strikes a Contemporary
- Rabbi Ben Ezra
- A Grammarian’s Funeral: Shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe
- An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
- Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
- Saul
- A Death in the Desert
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source minds
About the authors
1812–1889 · Victorian
Robert Browning (1812–1889) was born in Camberwell, London, and largely self-educated through his father's extensive library. Early long poems including Paracelsus (1835) and Sordello (1840) found little audience, and it was as a dramatic poet working in shorter forms — the dramatic monologue, which he made his own — that he found his lasting voice: "My Last Duchess," "Porphyria's Lover" and the collections Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864) built the reputation that The Ring and the Book (1868–69), a twenty-thousand-line account of a Roman murder trial told through multiple narrators' conflicting testimony, secured. In 1846 he married the poet Elizabeth Barrett, eloping with her to Italy against her father's wishes; they lived in Florence until her death in 1861, after which Browning returned to London with their son. He died in Venice in 1889, the day his last collection, Asolando, was published, and is buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.
1828–1911 · Victorian
Hiram Corson (1828–1911) was born in Philadelphia and worked at the Smithsonian Institution's library before turning to teaching, holding professorships at Girard College and St. John's College before joining Cornell University in 1870, where he taught English literature — Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare, and above all Robert Browning, whom he championed as a serious and rewarding poet against readers who dismissed him as simply obscure — until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1903. Known for teaching through reading poetry aloud, he also wrote A Primer of English Verse, An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare, and A Hand-Book of Anglo-Saxon and Early English.
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