Robert Browning (1812–89) was a prolific Victorian-era English poet and playwright. His complex psychological novel is the forerunner of modern fiction’s obsession with unreliable narrators and shifting narrative perspectives.
Born in Camberwell, London, Browning was an intelligent child. He was deeply influenced by his father’s wide-ranging collection of more than 6,000 books in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish.
By the time he was five, Browning could read and write well. He was a big fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley and asked for all of Shelley’s works for his thirteenth birthday. By the age of fourteen, Browning had learned Latin, Greek, and French.
Browning is widely recognized as a master of dramatic, evocative monologues, and psychological portraiture. His major work, Men and Women (1855,) contains his most exceptional dramatic monologues, such as “Love Among the Ruins,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” and “Bishop Bloughram’s Apology.”
Browning is best known for the children’s poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” His distinguished poem The Ring and the Book (1868–69) is a 21,000-line poem in four volumes derived from a 17th-century Roman murder trial. The story unfolds in the form of unreliable and incomplete claims and accusations of nine speakers. In this work, Browning achieved confusing yet informative relativity of perception that served to reiterate that experience is never distinct from who we are and how we see.
Browning was married to the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Robert Browning
There are those who believe something, and therefore will tolerate nothing; and on the other hand, those who tolerate everything, because they believe nothing.
—Robert Browning
So, fall asleep love, loved by me….for I know love, I am loved by thee.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Romance
Strike when thou wilt, the hour of rest, but let my last days be my best.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Tomorrow, The Future
And gain is gain, however small.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Profit
Inscribe all human effort with one word, artistry’s haunting curse, the Incomplete!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Effort
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
—Robert Browning
Topics: Kiss
Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain
—Robert Browning
Topics: Pleasure
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Fiction
What’s a man’s age? He must hurry more, that’s all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Age, Aging
There’s a new tribunal now higher than God’s—The educated man s!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Education
What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Ambition
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Love
Aspire, break bounds. Endeavor to be good, and better still, best.
—Robert Browning
When the fight begins within himself, a man’s worth something.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Fight, Control, Self-Control, Conflict, Self-Discovery, Discipline, Fighting
The grand perhaps! We look on helplessly, there the old misgivings, crooked questions are.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Uncertainty
Measure your mind’s height by the shade it casts.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Mind
June reared the bunch of flowers you carry from seeds of April’s sowing.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Seasons
When a man’s busy, leisure strikes him as a wonderful pleasure; and at leisure once is he? Straightway he wants to be busy.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Reality, Opportunities
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Solitude
But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall, and, baffled, get up and begin again.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Goal
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?
—Robert Browning
Topics: Aspirations, Goals, Democracy, Ambition, General
What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Youth
Grow old with me the best is yet to come.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Age, Aging
I would have rummaged, ransacked at the word; Those old odd corners of an empty heart; For remnants of dim love the long disused, And dusty crumbling of romance!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Romance
Make us happy and you make us good.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Happiness
The trouble that most of us find with the modern matched sets of clubs is that they don’t really seem to know any more about the game than the old ones did.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Golf
A minute’s success pays the failure of years.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Success, Failure, Society, One liners
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Singing
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Emotions
Oh the wild joys of living! The leaping from rock to rock … the cool silver shock of the plunge in a pool’s living waters.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Joy
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John Dryden English Poet
Elizabeth Barrett Browning English Poet
Algernon Charles Swinburne English Poet
Christina Rossetti English Poet
Coventry Patmore English Poet
Edmund Spenser English Poet
John Gay English Poet, Dramatist
Geoffrey Chaucer English Poet
Abraham Cowley English Poet
William Congreve English Dramatist