Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (43 page)

1880
Publication of
Dramatic Idyls, Second Series
(prompted by critical and commercial success of previous volume), including ‘Clive’ and ‘Pan and Luna’.

1881
Browning Society founded.

1882
Awarded honorary degree of DCL by Oxford University.

1883
Publication of
Jocoseria
, a collection of shorter poems including ‘Ixion’ (an attack on the doctrine of eternal punishment) and ‘Never the Time and the Place’.

1884
Awarded honorary degree of LLD by Edinburgh University. Publication of
Ferishtah’s Fancies
, philosophical and religious poems spoken by the Persian sage Ferishtah alternating with shorter lyrics; the volume is one of RB’s most successful and goes into several editions.

1887
Publication of
Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day
, comprising an indirect autobiography in which the poet ‘parleys’ with obscure figures from the past who were important not just in their day but in his own childhood and early youth, among them the poet Christopher Smart, the painter Francesco Furini and the musician Charles Avison.

1888–9
Publication of
Poetical Works
, 16 vols.

1889
12 December
. Browning dies in Venice, on the publication day of his final volume
Asolando
. Difficulties about burying him in EB’s grave in Florence (the cemetery is officially closed) could probably have been overcome, but Pen accepts instead an offer of a grave in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Further Reading

For a broader survey, see the chapter on ‘Studying Browning’ in John Woolford and Daniel Karlin,
Robert Browning
, London, 1996 (Longman Studies in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature).

1. EDITIONS

The Ring and the Book
, ed. R. D. Altick, Harmondsworth, 1971 (Penguin English Poets)

The Poems of Browning
, ed. J. Pettigrew and T. J. Collins, 2 vols., Harmondsworth, 1981 (Penguin English Poets)

Poetical Works of Robert Browning
, general editor I. Jack, Oxford, 1981– (in progress) (Oxford English Texts)

Robert Browning: The Poems
, ed. J. Woolford and D. Karlin, London, 1991– (in progress) (Longman Annotated English Poets)

Robert Browning: An Edition of the Major Works
, ed. A. Roberts, Oxford, 1999 (Oxford Authors)

2. CORRESPONDENCE

The Brownings’ Correspondence
, ed. P. Kelley, R. Hudson and S. Lewis, Winfield (Kansas), 1984– (in progress; vols. 1–15 so far issued, to 1847)

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, ed. F. G. Kenyon, 2 vols., London, 1897

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister
, ed. L. Huxley, London, 1929

Letters of Robert Browning
, ed. T. L. Hood, London, 1933

Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed in their Letters
, London, 1937

Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden
, ed. E. C. McAleer, Austin (Texas), 1951

New Letters of Robert Browning
, ed. W. C. DeVane and K. L. Knickerbocker, London, 1951

Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett
, ed. P. Landis, Urbana (Illinois), 1958

Browning to His American Friends
, ed. G. R. Hudson, London, 1965

The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846
, ed. E. Kintner, Cambridge (Mass.), 1969

Learned Lady: Letters from Robert Browning to Mrs Thomas Fitzgerald 1876–1889
, ed. E. C. McAleer, Cambridge (Mass.), 1969

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs David Ogilvy 1849–1861
, ed. P. Heydon and P. Kelley, London, 1974

Browning’s Trumpeter: The Correspondence of Robert Browning and Frederick F. Furnivall 1872–1889
, ed. W. S. Peterson, Washington D.C., 1979

More Than Friend: The Letters of Robert Browning to Katherine de Kay Bronson
, ed. M. Meredith, Waco (Texas) and Winfield (Kansas), 1985

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett: A Selection from the Courtship Correspondence
, ed. D. Karlin, Oxford, 1989

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Her Sister Arabella
, ed. S. Lewis, Winfield (Kansas), 2002

3. BIOGRAPHY

Mrs (Alexandra Sutherland) Orr,
Life and Letters of Robert Browning
, London, 1891

W. H. Griffin and H. C. Minchin,
The Life of Robert Browning
, London, 1910; 2nd edn, 1938

Betty Miller,
Robert Browning: A Portrait
, London, 1952

Maisie Ward,
Robert Browning and His World
, 2 vols., London, 1967–9

William Irvine and Park Honan,
The Book, the Ring, and the Poet
, New Haven (Conn.), 1974

John Maynard,
Browning’s Youth
, Cambridge (Mass.), 1977

Daniel Karlin,
The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
, Oxford, 1985

Clyde de L. Ryals,
The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography
, Oxford, 1993

Sarah Wood,
Robert Browning: A Literary Life
, London, 2001

4. CRITICISM AND WORKS OF REFERENCE

Mrs (Alexandra Sutherland) Orr,
A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning
, London, 1885; revised and updated in successive edns to 1896

G. K. Chesterton,
Robert Browning
, London, 1903

W. C. DeVane,
A Browning Handbook
, 2nd edn, New York, 1955 (first publ. 1937)

Robert Langbaum,
The Poetry of Experience
, New York, 1957

Park Honan,
Browning’s Characters: A Study in Poetic Technique
, New Haven, 1961

Robert Browning: The Critical Heritage
, ed. B. Litzinger and D. Smalley, London, 1968

W. David Shaw,
The Dialectical Temper: The Rhetorical Art of Robert Browning
, Ithaca, 1968

Harold Bloom,
A Map of Misreading
, Oxford, 1975

Herbert F. Tucker,
Browning’s Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure
, Minneapolis, 1980

E. Warwick Slinn,
Browning and the Fictions of Identity
, London, 1982

Philip Kelley and Betty Coley,
The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction
, Winfield (Kansas), 1984

Loy D. Martin,
Browning’s Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject
, Baltimore, 1985

John Woolford,
Browning the Revisionary
, London, 1988

Daniel Karlin,
Browning’s Hatreds
, Oxford, 1993

A Concordance to the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning
, compiled by R. J. Shroyer and T. J. Collins, New York, 1996

Donald S. Hair,
Robert Browning’s Language
, Toronto, 1999

THE BEGINNING

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This selection first published in Penguin Books 1989

Introduction, Notes, Chronology and Further Reading copyright © Daniel Karlin, 1989, 2004

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-141-92128-0

INTRODUCTION

^*
The two point ellipsis is a nineteenth-century convention for a dash.