Robert Browning and Romantic Allegory

Abstract

Readers have often charged that Robert Browning’s style is so difficult as to be more than occasionally incomprehensible. As Philip Drew (1970) has reminded modern critics, nineteenth-century readers often complained about Browning’s difficult, obscure and grotesque style. One exasperated contemporary reviewer called Browning’s poems ‘Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities’ (Drew 1970, pp. 70–2). These complaints collectively register the allegorical cast of Browning’s poetic difficulty. Like the difficultas of classical rhetoric, Browning’s style isprovoking, even deliberately so, because it insists on veiling, obscuring its referent by means of ‘quaintest conceits’ and ‘grotesque exaggerations’ (Drew 1970, p. 72) — phrases that signal the mixed inheritance of allegory after the Renaissance. This is not to say that allegory was a fixed mode until the late Renaissance. Even in medieval culture, allegory was subject to frequent generic modulations (Fowler 1982, pp. 192–5). But in Romantic and post-Romantic culture, allegory experiences such radical modulations that it seems to disappear altogether as realism and naturalism begin to dominate literary and cultural practice. My present argument concerns when and how nineteenth-century poets accommodate the figural power of allegory to apparently antithetical realist values. In this context, the Victorian cast of Browning’s difficulty extends the modern reinvention of allegory that begins with his Romantic predecessors.