Robert Browning |
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Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, in south-east London, in 1812. The major influences on his early development came from his father's large and eccentric library, his mother's deep Nonconformist piety, and his adolescent encounter with Romantic poetry (especially Shelley). After education at local schools and at home, he enrolled at the newly founded University of London in 1828, but left the following year. He travelled widely on the Continent in the 1830s and 1840s. He published Pauline anonymously and without success in 1833; Paracelsus (1835) made him known to London literary society. However, Sordello (1840), derided for its obscurity, blighted his career for over twenty years. He published a series of plays and collections of shorter poems, Bells and Pomegranates (1841-6). In January 1845 he began corresponding with Elizabeth Barrett; he met her in May 1845, and they were married in September 1846 after a clandestine courtship (because of Mr Barrett's implacable opposition to the idea of any of his children marrying).
The Brownings lived in Italy until Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death in 1861. Browning published Men and Women (1855), which contains some of his finest poems, but still did not restore his reputation (or his sales). After his wife's death, Browning returned to England with their only son, and settled in London. He published Dramatis Personae (1864), a collection which began to repair his critical fortunes; this process was accomplished by the appearance of The Ring and the Book (1868-9). Among the works of his later years, Fifine at the Fair (1872), Aristophanes' Apology (1875), La Saisiaz (1878), Dramatic Idyls (1879), Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887) and Asolando (1889) are outstanding. Browning died in Venice on 12 December 1889, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
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