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
Make no more giants, God!But elevate the race at once!
—Robert Browning
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
—Robert Browning
Topics: Kiss
Good, to forgive; Best to forget.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Forgiveness
Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain
—Robert Browning
Topics: Pleasure
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?
—Robert Browning
Topics: Goals, Ambition, Aspirations, Democracy, General
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Writing, Writers
I … know what I do, and am unmoved by men’s blame, or their praise either.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Realization, Acceptance, Awareness
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Love
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: Aging, Age
June reared the bunch of flowers you carry from seeds of April’s sowing.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Seasons
The grand perhaps! We look on helplessly, there the old misgivings, crooked questions are.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Uncertainty
My sun sets to rise again.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Optimism
‘Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Ambition, Trying
No sketches first, no studies, that
—Robert Browning
Topics: Art
When the fight begins within himself, a man’s worth something.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Self-Discovery, Discipline, Control, Conflict, Self-Control, Fighting, Fight
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph.
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Courage, Bravery
There’s a new tribunal now higher than God’s—The educated man s!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Education
Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Inspiration, Inspirational
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
What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Youth
A minute’s success pays the failure of years.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Failure, One liners, Society, Success
Make us happy and you make us good.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Happiness
It’s like those eerie stories nurses tell,
Of how some actor on a stage played Death,
With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart,
And called himself the monarch of the world;
Then, going in the tire-room afterward,
Because the play was done, to shift himself,
Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly,
The moment he had shut the closet door,
By Death himself. Thus God might touch a Pope
At unawares, ask what his baubles mean,
And whose part he presumed to play just now.
Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Death, Sincerity
Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Seasons, Autumn
I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Trust
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Solitude
Truth lies within ourselves: it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe. There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness and to Know rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape than in effecting entry for light supposed to be without.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Reason, Thought, Truth
A man’s worth something.
—Robert Browning
Truth never hurts the teller.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Truth
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
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