SD2322. William Bell Scott to William Michael Rossetti

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 340.

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11 January 1860

Thanks for Sordello. It is far from being a satisfactory work. I am quite dead certain that in the matter of obscurity, there can only be one good reason for it, and that is that the full meaning required could not be revealed even to the initiated without it, the expression being the very clearest of which the sense is capable. Moreover if the reader of poetry is subject to such throes of labor in plucking out its kernal, it remains poetry only by virtue of compositor’s form. But be this as it may—as one may not be one of the initiated, and after all, pigheaded—there is another objection entirely different and quite fatal to Sordello as a work of art. The poet there indicated, and whose development internally and externally is at great length elaborated, conveys no sense whatever of the age, country, and condition of mind required. King René and the troubadours, I suppose Browning to have thought of, as far as he intended to represent any one poetic nature, but the poem appears to me to have no completeness even in the mind of the author. After having nearly driven myself into melancholy madness, I confess to not yet knowing what relation the majority of the characters hold to each other.

Publication: R.W. Peattie, “W.M. Rossetti and Browning’s Sordello,” Browning Society Notes, 22 (December 1994), 54–55.

Manuscript: University of Durham.

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