R491204A. Poems (Boston, 1850).
Newark Daily Advertiser, 4 December 1849, p. 2.
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 16.
Mr. Browning’s poems have not the first element of popularity. With little of smoothness, grace or harmony, full of idiosyncracies [sic]—sometimes grotesque, even to the extreme; they nevertheless indicate originality of conception and intellectual force—often being weighty with thought—and are enriched throughout with gems of sentiment and fine imagery; but they require to be studied, and consequently give little of that pleasure to the general reader which poetry seems designed to impart. He has written much within the last eight years, and many of his poems are highly commended, especially by the “new school” English critics; yet his most partial reviewers condemn the disregard of established rules, the vagueness and absurdities apparent in his writings. He seems to have studied to be singular, and has proved himself an apt scholar; he scorns the ruling taste for the old British poets, and yet there is something almost pleasing in his audacity, betokening, as it does, that self-consciousness which is always, in a greater or less degree, an attribute of genius. And who can read carefully the “Paracelsus,” “Pippa Passes,” and “Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” without recognizing in them the faculty divine! The latter Mr. Dickens calls “the finest poem of the century.” These, and indeed nearly all Mr. B.’s poems are in the dramatic form; itself an indication of the creative impulse.
‘Paracelsus’ is less impassioned, and more meditative, than the other dramas referred to: it is philosophic, without being charged with the electric-spark—instructs and subdues, without enkindling the soul. The design of the poem is to illustrate the effect of knowledge unconnected with love. ‘Pippa Passes’ is a unique conception, but strikingly beautiful. The little silk-weaver, Pippa, is a character of pure ideal loveliness, whose soul-melodies pass into guilty consciences with the keenness of a fine-tempered lance. The following passage from a scene in this poem illustrating the power of remorse, is an admirable specimen of the author’s imaginative power:
Buried in woods we lay, you recollect:
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead,
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burnt thro’ the pine-tree roof—here burnt and there,
As if God’s messenger thro’ the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me.
But we confess that when an author sings of a “meandering name,” and of quenching the speed of a boat in “the slushy sand,” etc. his meaning is not so easily apprehended.
Mr. Browning was married about eighteen months since to Elizabeth Barret[t], the highly endowed author of “The Drama of Exile,” and the poet-pair are now sojourning in Italy. This beautiful reprint, by one of the most exact and scrupulous publishing houses in the country, is from the London edition—in the same style, and not inferior in typographical or external attractions.
[Elizabeth Clementine Kinney]
Reviewed:
Poems (RB), Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850.
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