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Allusion in Robert Browning's "A Death in the Desert".

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From: Victorian Newsletter
Date: 20020922
Author:Inglesfield, Robert

Robert Browning's blank-verse poem "A Death in the Desert," which first appeared in the collection Dramatis Personae in May 1864, is an extraordinary and critically problematic poem in which Browning attempts to engage with distinctively modern questions of religious belief and unbelief. Most of the poem is taken up with the speech of St John, the evangelist and last surviving apostle, now dying in extreme old age, in hiding from Roman persecution with a small group of followers. St. John's spiritual last testament, much of it densely argumentative and characterized by an often ...

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