Versions of Browning

Robert Browning. Poetical Works, Volume 1. The World’s Classics (London: Grant Richards), nd, c.1905.

Robert Browning. Poems and Plays. The Modern Library (New York: Random House), 1934.

Robert Browning. Browning. A selection by W.E. Williams. The Penguin Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 1954.

Robert Browning. Selected Poetry. Introduction by Horace Gregory. Rinehart Editions (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 1956. [shown at left]

Looking over this list, it surprises me that my most recent edition of Browning – the content if not the book itself – will soon be fifty years old. Of these four books, the Penguin is actually the newest: it is a 1979 printing, with a bluish reproduction of Frederick Lee Bridell’s ‘The Coliseum by Moonlight’ on the cover; I acquired it in Winnipeg in the early 1980s. The Grant Richards ‘World’s Classics’ edition was my great-grandfather’s, and came to me in 1980; the Rinehart’s origins are a bit obscure: the cover design suggests the 1960s, and I believe I got it in the mid to late 1980s. I bought the Modern Library ‘Giant’ at a second-hand bookshop on Granville Street in Vancouver about four years ago. Although my Brownings have been jumping around in time, from about 1905 to 1954, then to 1956, and finally back to 1934, the trend has been toward the comprehensive: with my latest purchase, I can finally say that I have just about all Browning’s verse close to hand.

These editions illustrate a melancholy trend in poetry publishing. The oldest among them was designed for people who at the very least wanted to give the impression that they read verse drama at home: the book is small, but the text is easy to read, and complete. The Modern Library edition professes completeness, but omits ‘Sordello’ on the grounds that ‘competent students of Browning’s poetry’ consider it ‘wholly unintelligible’. It dates from the period when Random House sold Proust through the Book of the Month Club, and made a small fortune on reprint titles like this Browning. It is a great cinderblock of a book, with the long poems reproduced in two columns of small but readable type – readable, yet condemned to suffer absurd indentations whenever Browning’s verse gets the better of the measure. Much as I admire it as an exercise in cultured risk, I prefer to read the Penguin and the Rinehart; but problems of a different sort begin to arise with these editions. The introduction to the Modern Library book speaks admiringly of the Browning Societies that sprang up in England and America to elucidate the poet’s obscurities and appreciate his brilliance, but the Penguin selection dismisses them with contempt, and the Rinehart book speaks of them as an extinct species. By the 1950s, it seems that Browning only existed in student editions, and his compilers felt compelled to take a swipe at the educated amateurs who had made up the bulk of his readership in previous generations.

Browning had a remarkable sense of character and an unusual command of narrative; he excelled at dramatic monologues, verse dramas, and book length poems. He is a difficult poet for a reader like me: someone who favours the economy of shorter pieces rather than the scope for variation and development in a work like ‘The Ring and the Book’. But I continue to fumble along in my Brownings, taking down slabs of the larger works before retreating to old favourites. Two stanzas of ‘A Woman’s Last Word’ keep coming back to me:

What so false as truth is,

   False to thee?

Where the serpent’s tooth is

   Shun the tree –

Where the apple reddens

   Never pry –

Lest we lose our Edens,

   Eve and I.

These eight lines demonstrate that Browning was just as capable of richness and complexity in small spaces as he was in the vast canvasses of the long poems. The language, too, is magnificent – particularly the tension built up by ‘Lest we lose’ and stretched out with ‘Edens, | Eve’ then released by ‘and I’: technique and meaning keep pace with each other here in perfect balance.

Perhaps this combination of skills – to compress on the one hand, and to open out on the other – was part of what made Browning so attractive to Pound; that, and Browning’s gift for seamlessly merging the history of individual lives with the cultures and wider histories that surround and work upon them. Browning can be justly criticized for having too many ideas, and for piling them up too fast and too thick; but that is part of the point: people often have too much to think, and then too much to say. Layer upon layer builds up, until it is difficult to distinguish the people from the stories they tell about themselves, or from the stories told about them. Behind all of this stands the figure of Browning himself, concealed in his characters but shining through them in the plain sight of his language. We can say that all poets construct a portrait of themselves in their work, as they offer both the work and the portrait as an example, or an analysis, of how they chose to live. Borges put it better than I can, in his poem ‘Browning Resolves to Be a Poet’:

I shall make ordinary words –

the marked cards of the sharper, the people’s coinage –

yield up the magic that was theirs ...

Agonies, masks, and resurrections

will weave and unweave my fate

and at some point I will be Robert Browning.

2002/05/25

Date posted: 2003-09-15