Robert Browning

Robert Browning was thought obscure for most of his life and lived in the shadow of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett, with whom he eloped to Italy in 1846, until The Ring and the Book made him, in his late fifties, Tennyson’s only rival. His form was the dramatic monologue, in which a duke, a painter or a murderer talks and gives himself away: My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi. The Poems the lists assign collect them; A Blot in the ’Scutcheon is the stage tragedy from his early attempt at the theatre. Pound and Eliot learned their voices from him.