Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Robert Browning (1812-1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax.

Robert Browning

“My sun sets to rise again.”

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Born in South London he was educated at home by a tutor, using the resources of his father's library. By the age of 12 encouraged by his father, Browning had written a book of poetry, which he later destroyed for want of a publisher.  He refused a formal career and ignored his parents' remonstrations by dedicating himself to poetry. He stayed at home until the age of 34, financially dependent on his family until his marriage. His father sponsored the publication of his son's poems.

Elizabeth Barrett-Browning (1806-1861)

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In 1845, Browning met the poet Elizabeth Barrett, six years his senior, who lived as a semi-invalid in her father's house in Wimpole Street, London. They began regularly corresponding and gradually a romance developed between them, leading to their marriage and journey to Italy (for Elizabeth's health) on 12 September 1846.  From the time of their marriage and until Elizabeth's death, the Brownings lived in Italy, residing first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence at Casa Guidi (now a museum to their memory).  In 1861, Elizabeth died in Florence and the following year Browning returned to London.  In the remaining years of his life Browning travelled extensively and in 1878 he revisited Italy for the first time in the seventeen years since Elizabeth's death.  Browning died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December 1889 and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Robert Browning

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"

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"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" was written in 1852. The title, which forms the last words of the poem, is a line from William Shakespeare's play King Lear. The poem opens with Roland's speculations about the truthfulness of the man who gives him directions to the Dark Tower. Browning does not retell the Song of Roland; his starting point is Shakespeare. The gloomy, cynical Roland seeks the tower and undergoes various hardships on the way, although most of the obstacles arise from his own imagination. Upon reaching the Tower, Roland finds all those who failed to reach the tower, and under it he finally shouts "Childe Roland to the dark tower came". What Roland finds inside the tower is not revealed.  Carol Rumens in the Guardian Newspaper Books Blog considers it “tempting to read the poem as an exploration of an inner state of mind, or even an account of "the battle with depression" even though Browning denied writing conscious allegory”.  She concludes that "Childe Roland" is one of darkest and greatest poems.

John Keats (1795-1821)

John Keats (1795-1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25.

Born in London his father, a livery-stable manager, died when Keats was 9 and his mother died when he was 15.  He worked as a junior house surgeon, at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospitals until 1817 when he devoted himself entirely to poetry.  Keats had first read Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene when he was eighteen and it awakened his love of poetry and shocked him into self-awareness of his own powers of imagination.

John Keats

“Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou cansst not leave...”

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The reviews of his early publications were mixed and after his death it was common to believe that these attacks had shaken Keats’s resolve and broken his health.  Most of Keats’ circle recognised the shortcomings of these early works: Shelley, for reasons of his own, exaggerated the effect of the conservative reviewers’ savage, and Byron was at first scornful of Keats’s weakness, as Shelley portrayed it to him, but refused to criticise him publicly after his death. Living in lodgings in Hampstead with his brothers, Tom and George, Keats met these reviews with a calm assertion of his own talents, and he went on steadily writing poetry.

In the summer of 1818 Keats went on a walking tour in the Lake District (of northern England) and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, and his exposure and over exertions on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis of which he was to die.  On his return to London he met Fanny Brawne, a near neighbour in Hampstead, with whom he soon fell hopelessly and tragically in love. The relation with Fanny had a decisive effect on Keats’s development, but his uncertain material situation and his failing health made it impossible for their relationship to run a normal course. After Tom’s death from tuberculosis in the autumn of 1818 (George had already gone to America), Keats moved into Wentworth Place in Hampstead with Brown, and in April 1819 Brawne and her mother became his next-door neighbours and 6 months later they got engaged.

John Keats

“The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes”

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It was during 1819 that he wrote the famous odes Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn and Ode on Indolence.  In style and power the odes represent Keats’s finest poetry; indeed, they are among the greatest achievements of Romantic art.

During 1820 Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis, suffering two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February and in the winter he moved to Italy into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome, today the Keats–Shelley Memorial House museum.  The first months of 1821 marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis and in February he died and was buried under a tombstone bearing no name or date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water." When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years but was thought of as a poet whose talent, though its development was cut short, was the equal of Shelley’s and Byron‘s.

John Keats

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Born on August 4, 1792, the year of the Terror in France, Percy Bysshe Shelley was to become one of the major English Romantic poets, widely regarded as one of the finest lyric and philosophical poets in the English language. In August 1811, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a 16-year-old woman his parents had explicitly forbidden him to see. His love for her was centred on the hope that he could save her from committing suicide and although Shelley’s relationship with Harriet remained troubled, the young couple had two children together. Their daughter, Elizabeth Ianthe, was born in June 1813, when Shelley was 21. Before their second child was born, Shelley abandoned his wife and immediately took up with another young woman. Well-educated and precocious, his new love interest was named Mary, the daughter of Shelley’s beloved mentor, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the famous feminist author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

“...whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command...”

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Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

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This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem—which is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination).   It was the inspiration for my monochrome portrait of Shelley. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and also a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity; Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.

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Lord Byron 1788-1824

“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone.” From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS, known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet, peer and politician who became a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence, and is considered one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement.  Byron spent his early years in Aberdeen, and was educated at Harrow School and Cambridge University. In 1809, he left for a two-year tour of a number of Mediterranean countries. He returned to England in 1811, and in 1812 the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' were published. Byron became famous overnight. In the wake of Childe Harold’s enormous popularity, Byron was lionized in Whig society. The handsome poet was swept into a liaison with the passionate and eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb, and the scandal of an elopement was barely prevented by a friend She was succeeded as his lover by Lady Oxford, who encouraged Byron’s radicalism.

Lord Byron 1788-1824

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone

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In 1814, Byron's half-sister Augusta gave birth to a daughter, almost certainly Byron's. The following year Byron married Annabella Milbanke, with whom he had a daughter, his only legitimate child. The couple separated in 1816.  Facing mounting pressure as a result of his failed marriage, scandalous affairs and huge debts, Byron left England in April 1816 and never returned.

He contracted a fever from which he died in Greece in 1824. Deeply mourned, he became a symbol of disinterested patriotism and a Greek national hero. His body was brought back to England and, refused burial in Westminster Abbey, was placed in the family vault near Newstead. Ironically, 145 years after his death, a memorial to Byron was finally placed on the floor of the Abbey.

Lord Byron, 2020 Oil on Paper 28x28cm (Private Collection)

 'Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage' was published between 1812 and 1818. Dedicated to "Ianthe", it describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man, who is disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

“Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.” Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. Plath met and married British poet Ted Hughes, although the two later split. The depressive Plath was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and attempted suicide in 1953.  More ECT followed and although she seemed to have made a good recovery she committed suicide in 1963 after the breakdown of her marriage to Hughes.

Sylvia Plath 1932-1963

Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

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Many of Plath’s posthumous publications were compiled by Hughes, who became the executor of her estate. However, controversy surrounded both the estate’s management of her work’s copyright and his editing practices, especially when he revealed that he had destroyed the last journals written prior to her suicide. Her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her singular verse an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion, and obsession with death. She garnered accolades after her death for the novel The Bell Jar, and the poetry collections, Colossus and Ariel.  In 1982, Plath became the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. 

Sylvia Plath

I eat men like air

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I have read a stunning biography of Plath by Heather Clarke titled Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.  It tells the tragic story of her life giving careful analysis of her work and a compassionate understanding of her relationship with Ted Hughes.  I found it thoroughly inspirational and would strongly recommend it.