According to an ancient Persian legend, quoted by E. F. Benson in The Challoners, a lover knocked one day at the door of his beloved and the beloved said, “Who is that?” He replied, “It is I,” and the one on the inside said, “There is not room for two.” So he went away, came back after a year, and knocked again. And again from the inside the voice said, “Who is that?” But this time he said, “It is thou.” So the door was opened and he went in.

The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential – and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. (Simone de Beauvoir xxxiv)

The name [of poet]

Is royal, and to sign it like a queen

Is what I dare not, – though some royal blood

Would seem to tingle in me now and then,

With sense of power and ache.

Aurora Leigh I. (934–38)

'Tis Antidote to turn –

To Tomes of solid Witchraft –

(Emily Dickinson, #593)

“Speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence – these are the qualities that hold us enthralled” as we read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1932 (1.212). As Woolf points out, these qualities emanate not so much from Aurora as from her creator, whose strong and lively presence so pervades the poem that “Again and again … Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. … [making it] impossible for the most austere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his [sic] eyes should be fixed upon the page” (212). And as Woolf observes, the “flesh” the critic touches is that of a woman who knows that the royal blood of poets flows through her veins. “Elizabeth the actual” is a subject, speaking boldly of the world as she perceives and experiences it.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is an unusual Victorian heroine because she ultimately combines career and marriage. Although Aurora's story has been recognized as an important revision of a traditional woman's story by such famous readers as Virginia Woolf (182–92) and Ellen Moers (60–62), some feminist critics have been disturbed by the ending, even as they describe its compelling feminist vision. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, while acknowledging that the story is a “rescripting,” argues that “being an artist is, at the end, reinterpreted as self-sacrifice for the woman, and thus is aligned with feminine ideology” (87). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that Aurora has to learn “not to be herself,” that is, she must learn sympathy and service (576–77). Deirdre David goes even further in asserting Barrett Browning's conservatism when she argues that Aurora's art does not subvert Romney's authority; instead, feminine art serves “male socialist politics” and “a woman's voice [speaks] patriarchal discourse – boldly, passionately, and without rancor” (134).

That Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had an influence on each other's poetry is difficult to doubt but more difficult to prove; their similar backgrounds and shared experiences, and a reticence in both to discuss their working habits, generally make attempts to fix possible influences between them problematic at best. Two periods of their shared lives, however, do provide an unusually clear record of the way each affected and was affected by the other's writings: the first, from their introduction in January 1845 until their marriage in September 1846, during which time Browning completed the last two numbers of his Bells and Pomegranates series and Elizabeth Barrett wrote her Sonnets from the Portuguese, and the second in 1855, when Browning published Men and Women. Their courtship letters show that they considered themselves engaged in a unique poetic as well as personal partnership, and their poetry of this time, together with Browning's 1855 volume, reveals that their creative interaction was more extensive than even they realized. Of particular note is the way that Browning's first version of “Saul” helped to shape the theme and imagery of Sonnets from the Portuguese, which in turn influenced his later conclusion to “Saul.”

So compelling has been Robert Browning's voice in the literary canon that it has almost drowned out the Other voice of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. One of the most impressive pleas to reevaluate the influence between this formidable and formidably married couple came from Flavia Alaya, who documented the mutuality of their political opinions and their shared fascination with the rescue theme. More recently, responding to the feminist wave of reevaluations of all poetic relations, of silences as well as voices, U. C. Knoepflmacher and Nina Auerbach presented some ways we might read the two poets in tandem, considering the manner in which one appropriated the other, for example, or the way their stories created a difference.

In the summer of 1847, the nineteen-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti came across a copy of Robert Browning's anonymous first book in the library of the British Museum. This discovery of Pauline (published in 1833) by a young poet already enthusiastic about Browning has long been justly famous. Not being able to obtain the book from the publisher – it had long since been removed from sale – Rossetti was forced to transcribe the entire text into a notebook. While doing so, he noticed a similarity between certain passages of Pauline and one of Browning's acknowledged early works, Paracelsus (1835). Several months later, on 17 October 1847, Rossetti wrote to Browning to ask if he were the author of Pauline. Browning's reply – the beginning of an important literary friendship – is presented here for the first time.

In letters to Mrs. Ernest Benzon and Mrs. Thomas FitzGerald, Browning claims affinity with the great philosopher of the Will, Schopenhauer, and asserts that elements of vitalism are the “substratum” of his life and work. These letters confirm the poet's place in the line of vitalist thought shaped by Schopenhauer, the English Romantics, and Carlyle and further developed by Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, Henri Bergson, and D. H. Lawrence. Vitalism resists precise definition; each theorist advances a singular terminology and application. Schopenhauer's vitalism may be understood from his concept of cosmic Will; Carlyle's from the essential presence of energy, movement, and change in the world. Bergson used the term élan vital and Lawrence such characteristically vague phrases as “sense of truth” and “supreme impulse” to express faith in forces operating beneath or hovering above the surface of life. Broadly put, when a rational orientation to the world ceased to be adequate, when rationalism devolved into a falsification of reality's authentic energy, major vitalists came into existence and posited as the true reality a primitive, universal force of which everything in that reality is an objectification. Unlike other vitalists in the English tradition, such as Blake and Lawrence, Browning was not comfortable with cosmic images. His vitalism breaks from the main line to focus on the individual human will, which he saw as an intuitive impulse and as a means to realize the self and locate its place in the world. For Browning, the comprehension of life's vital movement lay in the dynamic energy of willed action.

Robert Browning's poetry showed a special resistance to the text-oriented, aestheticizing tendencies of the New Criticism. It was easy, almost too easy, to find ways to talk about the speaker and his tone of voice; but difficulties arose the moment one tried to move from these statements, as one would in a poem by Keats or Frost, to statements about the poem. Something about the nature of the dramatic monologue itself seems to have been especially unreceptive to organic, unifying conceptions of art. It is not surprising that Roma King's broadly New Critical, The Bow and the Lyre, should have received acclaim at the time for (among other qualities) reading the unifying images in Browning's poems. But the work from that period that has had staying power, Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience, is one that hardly fit the critical temper of the time. In retrospect, we may say that its power derived especially from its refusal to let New Critical dogmas circumscribe the kinds of critical approaches applied to the odd form of the dramatic monologue. Langbaum's concept of experience was (is) attractive; his historical stories of the relation between Romanticism, nineteenth-century preference in drama for character over action, and the dramatic monologue were extremely interesting ones. But what was and remains most influential was a strategy for approaching the dramatic monologue, the famous one in which the poem commands a balance of judgment and sympathy. Langbaum's readings of the Duke and the rest have been much debated and often battered. The terms he laid down for the debate have proved hearty and persistent.

Fra Lippo Lippi, by mixing insults with affability, indignation with deference, self-righteousness with self-pity, and impenitence with confession, avoids arrest and professional embarrassment for his sportive sexuality and Bohemian sensibilities. Attempting to change the guards' perceptions (“Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!”) (vol. I, line 3) and win their sympathy, Lippo establishes a disarming fellowship of arrested development with them and identifies himself primarily as a painter from whom they should expect abnormal values. His clerical appearance falsifies his real character, which he insists they recognize so that their own blend of carnal sensations and immature artistic awareness will license his behavior. Lippo disrobes the “beast” (80) who cannot “subdue the flesh” (74), as he admits himself being, in hope that such creative stripteasing and sprezzatura will arrest the arresters. Fortunately for him, his auditors are susceptible enough to impulses of doing as one likes to disregard “the morality of [an] event [that] is indefensible” (Goldfarb 61); his methodical confirmation of them as his kindred souls undresses another spurious authority not entitled to enjoin his fleshliness. Moreover, the watch, being party to his ventures, vicariously satisfies a need to snatch a grace outside moral and social restraints, but imagined to be within art's reach. In awakening the police to greater artistic consciousness, Lippo tempts them with an idealized, barrierless profession partaking of holiness. He gains interpretive advantage by exploiting their naïveté, their torpor, and even their vain aspirations.

Robert Browning's music poem “A Toccata of Galuppi's” is built on a system of telescoping viewpoints that might best be diagrammed as concentric circles with Galuppi's music at the core. The speaker of this monologue, a type of smug nineteenth-century Englishman with a deep interest in science, uses the occasion of Galuppi's clavichord touch-piece to muse on possible reactions of the composer's eighteenth-century Venetian audience. As he does so, the speaker becomes something of an artist or creator himself, using his own imagination to recreate an evening at an eighteenth-century Venetian ball; but the speaker also is a critic, himself responding to and interpreting not only Galuppi's music but also the Venetians in their imagined responses to the music. In this best of all Browning's music poems, he has given us something of an analogue of his own method as artist and moralist, as well as an ironic understanding of the efficacy of art and its ongoing treatment by critical audiences.

Exegi monumentum aere perennius.… non omnis moriar. From Horace onward, the relationship of art to human mortality has been a major theme in literature – and one which obviously interested Browning, if we may judge from some striking variations he worked on it. In “Cleon” and “Abt Vogler,” for example, his speakers address the subject from very different points of view: Cleon, the pagan, argues that the fact his art will survive after his death cannot in any meaningful way confer immortality on him and that, as an artist, he even more than others is painfully aware of his own limited life; Abt Vogler, on the other hand, confident of the changelessness of God's good, sees in his art a promise that both he and his improvisation will endure. Given Browning's penchant for pushing ideas to extremes and turning them in unusual directions, it is not surprising that he would treat the topic in other less predictable ways – as he did, for example, by making the inert changelessness of works of art in “The Statue and the Bust” comment ironically on human failure to act, or by endowing the worldly and sensuous Bishop at St. Praxed's with an appropriately literal faith in the kind of immortality a suitably artful tomb would confer upon him. It is not surprising, then, that similar topics would appear in “A Toccata of Galuppi's.”

In several ways, The Ring and the Book presents itself as an epic. It is long, and long in the epic way: twelve books. It gives the impression of moving from place to place and from incident to incident, and it contains plenty of conflict, harrowing episodes, and violent struggles. And yet upon reflection, The Ring and the Book quickly loses its savor of the epic. Its length derives not from the sequential narration of causally-related, Fate-driven events of historical importance, but rather from a series of competing analyses of just one relatively brief and decidedly unheroic set of events. Very little in the way of incident is presented to the reader directly; instead, almost all of the events in the central story are recollected and accounted for in different ways by different speakers. The Ring and the Book seems to be more an epic of words than of deeds. As critics we speak of Browning's psychologizing, of his probing of motives, of the potential indeterminacy of the very truth he tells us he seeks to reveal. The arguments and structures of the poem thus aspire to the condition of irony, as may be confirmed by the poet's own doubts about his achievement at the end of Book 12. On this reading, Browning prompts us to a relativist, modernist, or even post-modernist stance, a view of considerable attractiveness.

Most of “Pan and Luna” is addressed not to an internal auditor but to what Gerald Prince calls the “virtual reader,” the reader the author imagines himself or herself to be writing to – in the case of “Pan and Luna,” the Victorian reading public. Prince observes:

Every author, provided he is writing for someone other than himself, develops his narrative as a function of a certain type of reader whom he bestows with certain qualities, faculties, and inclinations according to his opinion of men in general (or in particular) and according to the obligations he feels should be respected. This virtual reader is different from the real reader: writers frequently have a public they don't deserve. (9)

In addition to the distinction between the virtual reader and the real reader, Prince makes a further distinction between the real reader and the ideal reader. From the writer's point of view, “an ideal reader would be one who would understand perfectly and would approve entirely the least of his words, the most subtle of his intentions” (9).

Familiarity must never lead us to overlook the strangeness of Browning's work. “That it is Mr. Browning's pleasure to be enigmatical, may now, we suppose, be considered as an accepted condition of his literary dealings with the public,” wrote the reviewer of the pamphlet entitled Dramatic Lyrics, in the Athenaeum for 22 April 1843. He went on to complain that the “general designation, ‘Bells and Pomegranates,’ as yet remains a mystery. Which of these poems are Bells, and which Pomegranates – or why any one of them is either – is one of those secrets which we may suppose ‘shall be unriddled by and bye.’ In the meantime, it is equally difficult to understand how the disjecta membra which compose No. III. should have found their way into a professed collection of ‘Dramatical Pieces.’…In any case … they are mere fragments, varying in length from half a dozen lines upwards – apparently thoughts jotted down for after use – or rejected from their places in longer pieces, and denoting foregone conclusions – but scarcely important enough to have formed the materials of an independent publication” (385).