5275. RB to Moncure Daniel Conway
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 292–293.
Chez M. Laraison, Ste Marie, Pornic,
Loire Inférieure, France.
Sept. 17. ’63.
My dear Mr Conway,
I shall have literally only five minutes to give to this note, if I would catch the next Post and save a day. I can manage, however, to reply upon every point you mention—and you will understand why no more than such replies are set down. The date of the publication of each piece in the collection is printed, you will see, at the head of it. No poem has been omitted, and none added to the present edition, [1] —always excepting one very early thing, never known as mine, nor likely to be remembered by anybody. [2] There are no changes of importance in any of the poems—merely verbal corrections, nor many of these:—in the instance of “Paracelsus,” the few changes are simply a return to the original reading, which I had polished a little, in the second edition, [3] and done no good to. “Sordello” is corrected throughout; not altered at all, but really elucidated, I hope, by a host of little attentions to the reader: the “head-lines,” or running commentary at the top of the page, is added for the first time. [4]
I need not add that I shall be much interested in seeing your article, [5] and that, despite your judgeship and whatever its sentence, I shall always be
Yours heartily,
Robert Browning
Publication: NL, pp. 157–158.
Manuscript: Huntington Library.
1. RB’s Poetical Works (3 vols., 1863).
2. Pauline (1833).
3. Poems (2 vols., 1849).
4. Sordello (1840) had been omitted from Poems (1849). RB began working on a revision in late 1855 or early 1856 (see letters 3618, 3651, and 3726). According to the editors of the Longman edition of RB’s poems, “B. added 85 new lines [to Sordello] in 1863 … and made many other considerable verbal changes, mostly in bks. iii, iv and v; and he thoroughly revised the punctuation. … But the main new features of the edition besides the verbal revs. were the provision of quotation marks, almost entirely absent from 1840, and running-titles, the ‘elucidatory heading to each page’, forming a continuous ‘argument’ for each book” (The Poems of Browning, Vol. 1, ed. John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, London and New York, 1991, p. 359). RB prefaced the revision with a lengthy dedication to Joseph Milsand, which begins: “Dear Friend,—Let the next poem be introduced by your name, and so repay all trouble it ever cost me.”
5. Conway’s review of Poetical Works (1863) appeared in The Victoria Magazine, February 1864 (pp. 298–316).
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