Robert Browning

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.