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Increasing suspicion about Browning's Grammarian.(Robert Browning)(Victorian poetry)(essay)(Critical essay)

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From: Victorian Poetry
Date: 20060622
Author:Bohm, Arnd

Is it merely coincidence that three essays from the relatively small cluster of discussions dealing with "A Grammarian's Funeral" use questions in their titles? (1) Or is there something about the poem that is subtly disturbing, tantalizingly dubious? Ever since Richard D. Altick proposed that the poem might be a mock encomium, in the tradition of Erasmus' Praise of Folly, there has been a nagging sense that here too a straightforward reading misses Browning's characteristic irony. Most recently, A. D. Nuttall has taken, or rather mistaken, those complexities as a confusing ...

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