English Literature
The Romantic period was a movement in the literature of virtually every country of Europe, and lasted from about 1750 to about 1870. The Romantic period was characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature. Included in this freedom of thought was an exploration of the human consciousness. This evident newly found freedom is prevalent within many poems and short-stories from the Romantic period through the Modern era.
Authors, such as Robert Browning, utilized speakers and protagonists in his works to illustrate psychological extremes, such as perversion, inhumanity and insanity. This paper will explore the unorthodox writing of Robert Browning, while discussing Christina Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Wilfred Owen, and their use of these socially unacceptable issues.
Robert Browning was born in 1812 and died in 1889. He was well known for his experimentation with poems as he was met with much misunderstanding and indifference (Norton). Browning’s fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the speaker’s character.
The meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently reveals about himself in the process of rationalizing past actions, or plea-bargaining his case to a silent auditor in the poem. Rather than thinking out loud, the character composes a self-defense, which the reader is challenged to see through. Browning chooses some of the most debased, extreme and even criminally psychotic characters, no doubt for the challenge of building a sympathetic case for a character who doesn't deserve one and to cause the reader to squirm at the temptation to acquit a character who may be a homicidal psychopath (Johnson). One of his more sensational poems that supports these theories is "Porphyria’s Lover”.
The...
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