Literature Network » Robert Browning

A poet in an age of novelists Robert Browning took his time in wooing his wife but he was slower in winning over the novel-reading public, says Jonathan Bate Browning: A Private Life by Iain Finlayson HarperCollins, pounds 30, 758 pp pounds 26 ( pounds

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20040111
Author:Jonathan Bate

VICTORIAN POETS suffered from a double disadvantage. For one thing, they were always looking over their shoulders back to the generation of unprecedented talent and glamour that preceded them: Shelley and Keats, with their lyric genius and early deaths; Byron, with his effortless art and innumerable love-affairs; Coleridge, with his enormous intellect and fatal opium addiction. And for another, they lived in the first era in history when it was novelists rather than poets who were the true literary superstars.

Robert Browning was born in 1812, the same year as Charles Dickens. The poet had a ...

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