Selected Poems

Robert Browning, a towering poetic presence of the Victorian era, was hailed by Henry James as a tremendous and incomparable modern. The sheer immediacy and colloquial energy of his poetry ensure enduring appeal. Browning paints landscapes both suburban and sublime, combines lyric and demotic language, and introduces everyday events of the streets and marketplace into the rarified world of Victorian poetry.

This edition includes examples from the early Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845); from the masterpieces Mena and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864), and from the less familiar works of his later years. Together they convey the intensity, the lyric beauty, and the vitality of Browning's poetry.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Selected PoemsIntroduction
Note on the Text
Porphyria's Lover
Johannes Agricola in Meditation
Song from Pippa Passes ("The year's at the spring")
Scene from Pippa Passes ("There goes a swallow to Venice...")
My Last Duchess
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
The Pied Piper of Hamelin; A Chld's Story
"How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"
The Lost Leader
Meeting at Night
Parting at Morning
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church
Love Among the Ruins
A Lovers' Quarrel
Up at a Villa - Down in the City
Fra Lippo Lippi
A Toccata of Galuppi's
An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
Mesmerism
A Serenade at the Villa
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
The Statue and the Bust
How It Strikes a Contemporary
The Patriot
Memorabilia
Andrea del Sarto
In a Year
Cleon
Two in the Campagna
A Grammarian's Funeral

James Lee's Wife
I. James Lee's Wife Speaks at the Window
II. By the Fireside
III. In the Doorway
IV. Along the Beach
V. On the Cliff
VI. Reading a Book, Under the Cliff
VII. Among the Rocks
VIII. Beside the Drawing-Board
IX. On Deck

Gold Hair: A Story of Pornic
Dis Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de Nos Jours
A Death in the Desert
Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island
Confessions
Youth and Art
A Likeness
Mr. Sludge, "The Medium"
Apparent Failure
Epilogue [to Dramatis Personae]
House
Saint Martin's Summer
Ned Bratts
Clive
[Wanting is - what?]
Donald
Never the Time and the Place
The Names
Now
Beatric Signorini
Spring Song

Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines

Robert Browning (1812-1889) attended the newly founded University of London for a year before travelling widely on the Continent in the 1830s and 1840s. After a clandestine courtship, he married Elizabeth Barrett in 1846 and they lived in Italy until her death in 1861. He is one of the most significant and inventive of Victorian poets.

Daniel Karlin is a professor of English at University College, London. He has edited The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse.