Reviews

E520313A.  Poems (1852).

The Literary World (New York), 13 March 1852, p. 184.

As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 386.

It gives us pleasure to receive from Messrs. Francis & Co. a new edition of the Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, not only as a proof of the public appreciation of the highest order of poetry, but as evidence of the care and fidelity of the publishers in following the text of the author’s copy; from which, as we once had occasion to point out, an earlier edition had departed. With the exception of the series of Sonnets published by Messrs. Francis, with the eloquent Italian poem, “Casa Guidi Windows,” these volumes contain the whole of the London copy of the poems. The time which has passed since their first publication has only approved the judgment of the few and warm admirers of that period. There has been nothing since written more profound, subtler, with more original power, with a loftier and more sustained wing, than the peculiar strains of the Drama of Exile, the lyric animation of the Vision of Poets, the intense feeling wrought in vivid imagery of the Cry of the Children, or the classic fervor, animated by a higher spirit, of the Dead Pan. The genius of Mrs. Browning, with the poems of her husband and Alfred Tennyson, and a few others, redeem the age succeeding that of Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats, from the fear of abandonment by the Muses.

Reviewed:

Poems (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis, 1852.

___________________