Write life and works of Robert Browning.

Ans.

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812 in Camberwell. His father was a clerk in the Bank of England. His father was interested in reading and studying. He owned a home library of six thousand volumes. The poet’s mother was the native of Scotland. Till the age of fourteen Browning was sent to no school or university. He was kept under the supervision of a private tutor. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to University College, Gower Street. In his short age Browning had studied Elizabethans and Byron with special delight. He requested his mother to bring the Works of Shelley and Keats.”

His schooling was short and desultory, his education being attended to by a private tutor and by his father, who left the boy largely to follow his own inclinations. He was fond of music. Like Tennyson, this boy found his work early and for fifty years hardly a week passed that he did not write poetry. He began at six to produce poetry in imitation of Byron but unfortunately this early work has been lost. Then he fell under the influence of Shelley, and his first known work Pauline (1833) was be a tribute to Shelley and his poetry. He could find no publisher who could even consider this poem. Two years later appeared his Paracelsus and then his tragedy Strafford was put on the stage. Six years later after writing Sordello he became famous in 184.6. In that year he finished his Bells and Pomegranates. He eloped with the best known literary woman Elizabeth Barret whose fame was wide before and after her marriage with Browning.

Browning could not win favour of her family for fifteen years and during this time they remained in Pisa and Florence. The exquisite romance of their love is preserved in Mrs. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and in the volume of Letters, recently published. Mrs. Browning died in Florence in 1861. It was a great loss and Browning fled to England with his son. For the remaining part of his life, he stayed in London and Italy specially in Venice. Palazzo Rezzonico is a tourist place now a days for the lovers of Browning and English literature in Italy. His work was much appreciated in America than in England. By the publication of The Ring and the Book he was considered as an eminent poet by his countrymen. He died in Venice on Dec. 12, 1889, the same day that saw his last publication Asolando. Though Italy offered him an honoured place yet England claimed him to be her own, He lies dead beside Tennyson’s grave in Westminster Abbey.

Hs Works Pauline (1833)

Paracelsus (1835)

Strafford (1837)

Sondello (1840)

Bells and Pomegranates (1841)

Dramatic Lyrics (1842)

Colombe’s Birthday (1844)

Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)

In a Balcony (1845)

Men and Women (1855)

Dramatis Personae (1864)

The Ring and the Book (1868)