Robert Browning's Poetic Art: Dramatic Innovation, Psychological Depth, and Victorian Context
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Robert Browning (1812–1889) stands as one of the most technically daring and intellectually adventurous poets of the Victorian era. Through his perfection of the dramatic monologue, Browning transformed lyric poetry into a theater of voices, creating poems that are at once narratives, philosophical inquiries, and psychological case studies. This article examines Browning’s poetic art across three interrelated dimensions: (a) his formal and technical innovations, particularly the development of the dramatic monologue; (b) his representation of the mind in action and the complexities of human motivation; and (c) his engagement with the scientific, theological, and cultural debates of nineteenth-century Britain. Close readings of key texts—My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi, Caliban upon Setebos, and The Ring and the Book—demonstrate how Browning’s poetry anticipates modernist and even postmodernist concerns with the instability of truth and the multiplicity of perspective. The conclusion underscores Browning’s continuing relevance for twenty-first-century readers who grapple with questions of subjectivity, morality, and the limits of knowledge.
Author: Anirban Sen
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7102397437
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