Customer Reviews

My Last Duchess and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

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I have started to read a bit on Browning and decided to get an idea of his poetry. Given the price of this book, this was a good choice.

Browning covered a lot of ideas, and all are written very intelligently. Reading through this book though, may cause you to scratch your head. If you read it, enjoy each selection rather than try to read straight through.

This is what I mean by the arrangement; I poem on the killing of a loved one (Porphyria's Lover) precedes the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The jump in ideas can slow you down a bit. The arrangement is logical in that the editors printed the poems in groups according to the collection they were originally published in. These collections, in turn, are arranged in chronological order. This is good because you can watch Browning's work as time progresses.

There are 42 poems in this selection. It does include the great ones (I will abbreviate titles) like Andrea del Sarto, Caliban upon Setebos, Karshish, Childe Roland, My Last Duchess, Fra Lippo Lippi, The Bishop Orders His Tomb, Johannes Agricola, and others.

I would recommend this book for reflecting on the occasional work of a great poet.

Robert Browning is a treat, especially to read out loud. This book includes "My Last Duchess," of course, and some great poems like "The Bishop Ordering His Tomb" and "Fra Lippo Lippi." I like to think of Robert Browning as the first poet of the twentieth century since he really can't be put in a box with Tennyson or other popular poets of his own time. Also, he had a big influence on Ezra Pound who, in turn, had a big influence on many popular poets today.

Dover Thrift Editions are surprisingly well-constructed - they'll outlast, say, your Oxford World Classics paperbacks - and the poetry is usually very well selected. Oh...and they're cheap!

Robert Browning is one of the most original, influential, and controversial English poets. Though particularly deft in blank verse, he mastered a wide array of forms and techniques, making him one of the language's most diverse poets in terms of form. One of his most striking aspects is how immediately different he is from his Victorian contemporaries whose formalism and tendency toward flowery lyricism made them the object of Modernist contempt. In stunning contrast, Browning is vibrant and effusive, positively overflowing with vigor and energy. Frequent use of traditional forms, and especially strict meter and rhyme adherence, ensure he could never be mistaken for later poets, but post-Victorian poetry's arc runs most clearly through him. His diction was revolutionary, sometimes aping actual speech with stunning success while remaining poetic in a way that, say, Alfred Tennyson would never have even considered. More often, he did the opposite - scaled verbal heights so fearsome that few would have even dared attempt them. In addition, he is England's most fearless rhymer and rivaled only by Edgar Allan Poe as the most fearless in the language. Subject matter was also of immense importance to Browning's uniqueness and influence. In contrast to most nineteenth century poets, who focused largely on personal matters and nature, he dealt with seemingly everything else, covering an astonishing variety of historical, artistic, philosophical, theological, and ethical ground. It is easy to exaggerate this aspect, because Browning wrote often and movingly about love, and some other poems may metaphorically deal with personal concerns. He was also notable for frequent humor use. That said, the aforementioned qualities are Browning's most recognizable and those that most strongly struck contemporaries and the many he has influenced.

Browning is of course most famous for dramatic monologues, a poetic form that had been used in English before but of which he became undisputed master. The techniques gives a story from a single character's point of view, forcing us to filter the truth through perspectives that are often self-interested, unreliable, or simply surreal. It is highly interesting - even fun - on the most basic level to decipher what is really going on, but psychological insight is the form's true strength. Browning traces thoughts and emotions so vividly that his characters seem truly alive in a way that is extremely rare in poetry. The sheer variety of his characters is also notable; he dramatizes a vast assemblage of historical figures and fictional personages across centuries and cultures - seemingly everyone but the Victorian Everyman. Even more intriguingly, many of his characters are psychopathic, evil, or otherwise unsavory, giving a fascinating peek into dark minds. As all this suggests, his work is extremely complex in a way that literature, and poetry particularly, almost never was until the Modernists. Browning's subjects and speakers first seem almost unbelievably out of step with contemporaries, and this was to a large extent deliberate. However, a closer look shows that some works - notably "Caliban upon Setebos" - allegorize contemporary concerns. More importantly, Browning gets at the heart and mind's elemental forces that are universal across history, digging deeply to reach the motivations and contradictions at humanity's core. This is one of the main reasons that his work stands up so much better than most Victorians'; what made him seem of another era then now makes him seem almost of ours - nay, of any.

As all this implies, Browning's work in many ways has far more affinity with prose than verse; his dramatic monologues especially recall Henry James. This is one of the reasons he was denied fame and success for several decades and the prime reason he has been hotly debated since achieving them. Oscar Wilde famously quipped that Browning used poetry as a medium for writing in prose, and many agree. Those who cherish consistent tone elevation, directness, and simplicity - particularly those who scoff at rhyme and meter that draws attention to itself - will most likely loathe Browning. Conversely, those who like diversity and experimentation in these areas, as exemplified by poets like John Donne, will almost certainly love him. Anyone even remotely interested in poetry must at any rate read the works and come to individual conclusions.

This collection is an excellent primer, with forty-two poems over 113 pages. Browning is in many ways hard to anthologize because some of his best and most well-known works are lengthy, but this has all of his best-known short works with the strange exception of "Rabbi Ben Ezra." The only excerpt from a longer work is the Pippa Passes song containing his most famous lines. Anyone unfamiliar or underfamiliar with Browning would thus do well to start here; the selection is quite generous and representative. Nearly every poem is great, and there are several masterpieces. It is important to keep in mind that this is only a sampler, and one of its virtues is that it leads one to more Browning. Needless to say, anyone wanting a more comprehensive book will need to look elsewhere. So may a few others. Like other Dover Thrift Editions, this is essentially bare bones; other than a short headnote, a table of contents, title and first line indices, and a (very) few text notes, there is no supplemental material. Browning's plethora of historical references, many of them obscure, makes notes necessary for most, and this thankfully differs from most Dovers in at least giving the bare minimum needed for basic comprehension. The packaging is also not of the highest quality. These limitations mean the book is not for all, but it is hard to beat as a basic introduction - especially considering the price, which is almost unbelievable in light of the stellar contents.

"Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made"

Browning is the poet of the dramatic monologue, the story told through the voice of a principal speaker, often an ironical one. Browning is an intellectual and moral poet whose work has a kind of toughness and strength. The poems in this small collection are among his most memorable and anthologized.
An excellent collection for coming to know one of the major Victorian English poets.

Robert Browning's poetyr is more difficult than his contmeporaries, arnold and tennyson (the lower-cases are intentional) and much better. Reading "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" makes one wonder why Kafka was so uplifting, yet the same poet also writes such charming verse for shildren as "The Pied Piper of Hamlin". A marvelous book!