Robert Browning's "Love Among the Ruins"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 ā¢ 729 Ratings
šļø 20 May 2021
ā±ļø 12 minutes
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Summary
Robert BrowningĀ (7 May 1812 ā 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whoseĀ dramatic monologuesĀ put him among the foremostĀ Victorian poets. His poems are noted forĀ irony,Ā characterization, dark humour,Ā social commentary, historical settings and challengingĀ vocabularyĀ andĀ syntax. His career began well, but shrank for a time. The long poemsĀ PaulineĀ (1833) andĀ ParacelsusĀ (1835) were acclaimed, but in 1840Ā SordelloĀ was seen as wilfully obscure. His renown took over a decade to return, by which time he had moved fromĀ ShelleyanĀ forms to a more personal style. In 1846 Browning married the older poetĀ Elizabeth BarrettĀ and went to live in Italy. By her death in 1861 he had published the collectionĀ Men and WomenĀ (1855). HisĀ Dramatis PersonaeĀ (1864) and book-lengthĀ epic poemĀ The Ring and the BookĀ (1868ā1869) made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation today rests mainly on his middle period. By his death in 1889, he was seen as a sage and philosopher-poet who had fed into Victorian social and political discourse. Societies for studying his work formed in his lifetime and survived in Britain and the United States into the 20th century.
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Thursday, May 20th, 2021. |
| 0:06.1 | Today's poem is by an English poet and playwright who was born in May of 1812. |
| 0:12.7 | So another May birthday poet here. It's Robert Browning. He lived from 1812 until 1889. |
| 0:18.1 | And it was one of the most important Victorian poets. He was an extremely influential |
| 0:23.1 | poet on many of the people who came after him. He was to just look at a long list of admirers |
| 0:30.1 | of people who loved his work, who were motivated and inspired by his work. They would include people |
| 0:34.9 | like, oh, I don't know, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, George |
| 0:37.9 | Bernard Shaw, Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Navakoff, even Stephen King has suggested that he was |
| 0:43.7 | influential. Plus, there's Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot and Rudyard Kipling. I could go on and on. |
| 0:49.2 | One of the most important poets of the last 200 years. And I could choose, you know, there's any number of poems |
| 0:55.9 | that I could choose by Robert Browning. In fact, I may do another one tomorrow because I haven't done |
| 0:59.4 | enough of him on the podcast and he deserves a closer look. But the one that I chose, the one that |
| 1:04.9 | I'm going to do today, is called Love Among the Ruins. It's like many of his poems a bit long, but not his longest. I'll keep my |
| 1:14.0 | comments short, but I did want to share it with you. It's from 1855, and it's from a collection |
| 1:19.7 | called Men and Women. And it's got a very interesting form. If you want to look it up, I recommend |
| 1:25.0 | you do that. Visually, it's an interesting poem. |
| 1:32.3 | We've got couplets, but the first line of each couplet is much longer. |
| 1:35.9 | The second line is only just a couple of words, a couple of syllables. |
| 1:38.2 | And that's throughout the whole poem. |
| 1:41.2 | This is, again, a super influential poem. |
| 1:45.5 | There's a Edward Burns-J Jones painting that was inspired by it. |
| 1:50.3 | Evelyn Waugh, the great novelist who read Brideshead revisited. He wrote a novel in 1953 with that same title. There was a TV movie with Catherine Hepburn and Lawrence Olivier that was inspired by that. |
... |
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