Thoughts & Opinions

 "If there ever lived a poet to whom the best minds pour out libations, it is Robert Browning. We think of him as dwelling on high Olympus; we read his lines by the light of dim candles; we quote him in sonorous monotone at twilight when soft-sounding organ-chants come to us mellow and sweet. Browning's poems form a lover's litany to that elect few who hold that the true mating of a man and a woman is the marriage of the mind. And thrice blest was Browning, in that Fate allowed him to live his philosophy—to work his poetry up into life, and then again to transmute life and love into art. Fate was kind: success came his way so slowly that he was never subjected to the fierce, dazzling searchlight of publicity; his recognition in youth was limited to a few obscure friends and neighbors. And when distance divided him from these, they forgot him; so there seems a hiatus in his history, when for a score of years literary England dimly remembered some one by the name of Browning, but could not just place him" (Elbert Hubbard). Found online At The Literature Network, check it out under useful sites, first page!

"During his lifetime Robert Browning was consistently a controversial figure, and the vitality of his verse was revealed in the rich diversity of the explication and criticism devoted to him. It would be untrue to affirm that since his death he has ceased to be controversial or that explication has waned in like measure with the praise" (Crowell IX).

"Every idea is indissolubly linked to every other idea, for one of the central concepts of the poet is the wholeness of man's development. His attitude toward evil, for example, cannot be understood unless one has an accurate understanding of his respect for the triple soul — body, mind, and spirt" (Crowell IX).

"In our century it has become a commonplace of Browning criticism to discover that the poet was a woolly thinker, to be deplored as a philosopher, and a 'semantic stutterer,' who failed to communicate his beliefs with any marked succes" (Crowell IX).