<i>Britta Martens</i> Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice<i>Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice</i>. Britta Martens. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Pp. ii+285.

Previous articleNext article FreeBritta Martens Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice. Britta Martens. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Pp. ii+285.Patricia RiggPatricia RiggAcadia University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy, Britta Martens offers a compelling overview of authorship in the poetics of Robert Browning. The book is a welcome addition to Browning scholarship after a very lean decade in book-length studies of this major Victorian poet. Martens challenges the long-standing assumption that Browning’s development of the dramatic monologue into a form perfected and nuanced as a trademark standard of excellence is directly related to his retreat from the Romanticist self-expressive poetics that he felt were such an embarrassment in his early work. Excluding the popular dramatic monologues from her study, Martens focuses on poems in which Browning speaks, she suggests, in propria persona, or in his own voice. These poems span his career and enable Martens to trace Browning’s engagement with his reading public in poetic discourse about poetry, authorship, and audience. She points out the tensions that arise from Browning’s sustained ambivalence about the value of the Romantic expressive poem, and she suggests that, in propria persona, Browning works through a process similar in technique to that of the dramatic monologue, a process that enables him to reveal ironically the “biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker Robert Browning” (3). Furthermore, points out Martens, in undermining his own authority as poet, Browning anticipates the modernist erasure of the author that developed throughout the twentieth century.Martens is scrupulous in both her contextualizing research and in her analysis of poetry that she identifies as crucial to tracing the uneven trajectory of Browning’s transformation of his younger, less mature Romanticist poetics into his mature poetics. Although development of her thesis is complicated by Browning’s satire and his unreliable persona, Martens constructs a reasonable and reasoned explanation for Browning’s perplexing tendency to embed poetic discourse in his poetry even as he distances himself from the authorial voice through characteristics specific to the speaker in the context of the poem. In focusing on some of Browning’s most complex and obscure poems and in engaging in critical discourse with a comprehensive list of Browning scholars, she meets the challenges associated with undertaking revisionary readings of any poet, challenges related to her reader’s familiarity with the work, to the exhaustive examination of the work by a long critical heritage, and to recent critical emphasis on less well-known nineteenth-century writers. The book is organized chronologically, beginning with Browning’s entrance into the Romantic tradition in the confessional poem Pauline. The second chapter features Sordello, and the third focuses on Browning’s complex working relationship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. By this point, he was moving away from Romanticism in lyric work that challenged the construct of the Romantic visionary poet. The penultimate chapter deals with The Ring and the Book, which Martens clearly views as a climax in Browning’s non-Romantic expression of his poetics, and the final chapter is concerned with some of the longer dramatic poems of Browning’s later years, when his ambivalence about separating himself completely from the Romantic tradition is clear. All of Martens’s astute analysis is made more interesting by a parallel thread that traces Browning’s precarious balancing of what he perceives readers want from him with what he wants to say to readers. She suggests that the paratext through which Browning speaks directly to readers is evidence of his keen awareness of the complex relationship that manifests itself in various configurations among author, poet-speaker, and reader.In contextualizing her argument in many years of established critical discourse, Martens inevitably travels over some well-worn ground. Her discussion of Pauline, for instance, includes reference to some of Browning’s letters and early prefaces in which he responds to criticism of his poetry. However, she shows that Pauline includes paratexts that make the poem not only a Romantic confession but also a dramatic performance. The chapter on Sordello, which Martens views as a transitional work, offers fresh insight into difficult sections of this complex poem as author and reader simultaneously resist each other and find themselves integrated into what she terms “author-centred and reader-centred models of interpretation” (52). She enters into lively debate with twentieth-century critics who have tackled Sordello, focusing specifically on the Venice digression as the place in which Browning is able to express his “new impersonal poetics” (83). Sordello is the poem in which Browning first splits himself into poetic entities, Martens suggests, with his young “self” represented by the hero, his more mature “self” by the narrator, and his new, advanced “self” by his paratextual author (51). Martens concludes that Browning’s self-awareness in this respect differs from that of Arnold and Clough, who articulate their poetics in prose works separate from the poem. Martens’s perspective on Elizabeth Barrett Browning as both mentor and foil is one of the highlights of the book. She takes issue with those who maintain that Browning felt some rivalry with his wife and suggests instead that when he speaks in his own voice it is clear that he genuinely tries to follow her model even as he uses her as a way to define himself in very different poetic terms. The close reading of “The Guardian Angel” is particularly useful to this exploration of Browning’s resistance to the expressive voice that impedes his “genuine artistic character” (63). Martens also disputes claims that “One Word More” is an expression of Browning’s private feelings and points out his ironic allusions to the Sonnets from the Portuguese. In her discussion of The Ring and the Book, Martens points out Browning’s self-reflective discussion of the complex relationship between poet and reader, a relationship in this case that is determined by the relative nature of truth. In a detailed analysis of Books 1 and 12, she demonstrates Browning’s anticipation of Modernist poetics through the poet-speaker, who is aware not only of the poet’s visionary perceptiveness but also of the relative nature of all truth. She makes the case that in these books Browning establishes a rapport with the British public in what he knows is an increasingly competitive market for poetry. The tension between the poet-speaker as a character in the poem and the author who, in propria persona, undermines the poet-speaker is for Martens a central interest of The Ring and the Book. In her final substantive chapter, Martens focuses on Browning’s later work and on sustained links that she finds between Browning and the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. Browning’s poetics continued to be shaped, she points out, by his reaction to harsh critical reviews and by his awareness of his dependence on his readers.This is an academic book written in a clear prose style. If there is a weakness in this fresh look at relatively little studied elements of the Browning canon, it perhaps lies in the author’s assumption that Browning is indeed speaking in propria persona in all the works included in this study, and I suspect that future critics might challenge the sometimes tenuous distinction Martens makes between authorial voice and poet-speaker. However, the analysis is convincing and intelligent, inviting us to enter into a nineteenth-century discourse on poetics and authorial presence. The bibliography is comprehensive and reflects the carefully contextualized analysis of Browning’s culture and experience. The index, with well-conceived subentries, indicates the nuanced distinctions Martens makes as she situates her work within the significant critical body of Browning scholarship to date, enhancing the book’s usefulness to scholars working not only on Browning but on Barrett Browning and on other authors who provide the critical context for this study. Scholars working more generally on the whole area of the cultural production of poetic texts will appreciate the ground Martens has broken with respect to Robert Browning’s authorial presence constructed to enable him to articulate his developing system of poetics. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 2November 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/671963 Views: 278Total views on this site For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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