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Page 143 how one poet defines himself in relation to Shakespeare. Browning distances himself from the Romantics and their particularly subjective poetry by perfecting the dramatic monologue, a genre that calls to mind the “objectivity” of Shakespearean drama. Moreover, Browning insists on a distinction between the private lives of poets and the public works they create. A second level of appropriation also occurs in the 1880s, when the Browning Society promotes Browning as a Victorian bard, more masculine and more religious than Shakespeare—in short, a more wholesome national poet. I Objective and subjective poetryAt the beginning of the 1850s, Browning began carefully to distinguish between the art of Shelley and that of Shakespeare. While residing in Paris during the winter of 1851, Browning was asked to write an introduction for a new collection of what were believed to be Shelley’s letters. Although the letters were later discovered to be spurious, the “Essay on Shelley,” as it has come to be known, represents one of the few pieces of literary theory ever written by Browning.2 In the “Essay,’’ Browning carefully outlines the distinctions he sees between an “objective” poet such as Shakespeare and Shelley as a “subjective” poet. In so doing, Browning works out his own role as a poet. Browning defines the objective poet as a person “whose endeavour has been to reproduce things external (whether the phenomena of the scenic universe, or the manifested action of the human heart and brain) with an immediate reference, in every case, to the common eye and apprehension of his fellow men” (Browning 1997: 574). The objective poet explains the world in terms understood by many, because he sees “external objects more clearly, widely, and deeply, than is possible to the average mind” (574). Being “in sympathy” with the “narrower” conception of the object under consideration and “careful to supply it with no other materials than it can combine into an intelligible whole” (574), the objective poet such as Shakespeare is attracted to the drama as a medium. His works are intelligible in part because his characters are both complete and concrete. Thus, while the abstract notion of “intellectual paralysis” may seem remote and incomprehensible, when viewing a character such as Hamlet we understand the concept because the character seems finished. Browning calls the objective poet a “fashioner” (574): “the thing fashioned, his poetry, will of necessity be |
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