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substantive, projected from himself and distinct” (574–75). For this reason, poetry has nothing to do with the biography of the poet; though biographies may be “fraught with instruction and interest,” they are ultimately dispensable, because the “man passes, the work remains” (575). In the ‘‘Essay on Shelley,” Browning even refuses to name Shakespeare; in the single reference he makes, Browning calls him, instead, the “inventor of ‘Othello’” (575).

While the objective poet deals with “humanity in action,” the subjective poet struggles with “the primal elements of humanity” (576). The subjective poet, then, is a “seer,” a prophet rather than a “fashioner,” and what he “produces will be less a work than an effluence” (576). His biography, unlike the objective poet’s life story, is important because “that effluence cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality, —being indeed the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not separated” (576). A knowledge of the personality of the subjective poet is essential: “in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it without loving him” (576).

Browning remained troubled over which kind of poetic model was best, concluding in the “Essay” that there is no way to judge which of these poetic gifts is the greater, as there is a need for both types of poetry and poets. While it might seem that the subjective poet is “the ultimate requirement of every age,” Browning regards the objective poet as equally important, “[f]or it is with this world …that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned” (577). Thus, Browning suggests a cyclical view of poetic history: after the lofty insight of seers and prophets, there will come an “imperative call for the appearance of another sort of poet, who shall at once replace this intellectual rumination of food swallowed long ago, by a supply of the fresh and living swathe” (578). It seems in these lines that Browning defends his own attempts to create new, “fresh” ways of looking at the world, to distinguish himself from the dominating influence of Shelley and other Romantic predecessors and to associate himself with Shakespeare. The poetic result is Browning’s dramatic monologue.

While a single definition of the dramatic monologue is impossible, the form usually contains a speaker who unconsciously reveals more about himself than he intends. Unlike many of the Romantics, who purportedly drew their inspiration from solitude and isolation, Browning writes about “men among men,” combining the perspective of the

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