SD2141. Charles Kingsley to W.A. Hills

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 345 (in part).

Eversley

18 March 1858

… I wish I could give you a hopefuller answer about your poems than this. I don’t deny a certain power in them: but I find the power very much mis-spent. They are so involved & obscure that I cannot make out what they mean. … Instead of trying to cram the maximum of subjective thought into each line … just try & translate simply & literally a hundred lines of old Homer; try & write a simple Ballad like one of those in Percy’s Reliques, or a simple song like dear old Tommy Moore’s Irish melodies; & then one will be able to tell how much poetry you have in you. I fear very much you have been studying Robert Browning, & taking Sordello & Paracelsus for your model. Now let me tell you—a man who has been at a public school & a university ought to know better. Browning has been at neither & has never had any real intellectual or critical training; & hence he is a fine poet manqué …

Publication: None traced.

Source: Sotheby’s Catalogue, 10 February 1970, lot 245.

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