Robert Browning was an English poet who was very fond of dramatic verse. This made him one of the most important Victorian poets. He wrote poems commonly containing peculiar mindsets, dark humor, and irony. The speakers he chooses for his poems are usually a metaphor for poetry themselves, being artists and musicians. His successes as well as his failures caused the content of his works to take different forms, with his wife’s death providing the final transformation. Browning's career began with much promise, but didn’t succeed short term. The lengthy poem Pauline caught the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and he wrote Paracelsus soon after, which Wordsworth and Dickens praised. In 1840, however, Sordello, which most thought to be obscure in nature, brought his reputation down. It took over a decade just to …show more content…
Their marriage became one of the most notable in all of literary history. They lived in Italy together, a country which is often depicted in his works. He had published the highly important collection Men and Women just before she died in 1861 of respiratory failure. Her death struck him hard, as he had spent many years caring for her in her illness. It also greatly influenced his style and works; he developed his fascination with peculiar minds from this experience, and Porphyria’s Lover as well as My Last Duchess display this fascination the most out of his collection of works. In the wake of his death in 1889, Browning was named a kind of philosopher who, through his divergent poetry, had contributed much to the Victoian era. Some critics have even attested that Caliban upon Setebos may be a commentary on the recently discovered theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. Though unusual for a poet, many societies formed to study his works while he yet lived. These Browning Societies continued to thrive in the U.S. and Britain until about the late 20th