The Poems of Browning: Volume Three

The third volume in the highly respected Longman Annotated English Poets edition of The Poems of Browning.

Robert Browning (1812-1889) is considered to be one of the foremost Victorian poets. This third volume focuses on the poetry written by Browning during his marriage to the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It starts with "The Guardian Angel", and ends with Browning's adaptation of an epigram by Walter Savage Landor.

The Poems of Browning

Volumes one (1826-1840) and two (1841-1846) presented the poems from his early years up to his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, including the dramatic poem Paracelsus (1835), which first brought him to wide attention, and Sordello (1840), which confirmed him as a poet of ambition and imagination.

Volume three (1847-1861) of The Poems of Browning covers the years of Browning's life in Italy with his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During the fifteen years of his marriage and self-imposed exile, Browning produced Christmas-Eve and Easter Day (1850), a major statement of his religious philosophy, and Men and Women (1855), his greatest collection of shorter poems. The poems of Men and Women, like all Browning's work, are steeped in his wide and idiosyncratic knowledge of literature, music, art, history, and popular culture, but a new and distinctive touch comes from the sights, sounds and textures of ordinary life in Italy. Based on a comprehensive study of textual and contextual sources, including a significant amount of hitherto undiscovered or unpublished manuscripts of poems and letters, this volume offers the most complete and informative edition of works that are central to Browning's achievement. In addition, Browning's most important work of critical prose, the Essay on Shelley, is presented in an appendix with full annotation, and poems which refer to specific works of painting or sculpture are illustrated with colour plates.

Volumes four presents the poetry Browning produced during the decade following the...