Poetry by Robert Browning

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 25. Chapters: Andrea del Sarto (poem), A Toccata of Galuppi's, Caliban upon Setebos, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, Count Gismond, Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, Dramatis Personae, Ferishtah's Fancies, Fra Lippo Lippi (poem), Hervé Riel, Home Thoughts from Abroad, How they Brought the Good News From Ghent To Aix, Jocoseria, Johannes Agricola in Meditation, Love Among the Ruins (poem), Men and Women (poetry collection), My Last Duchess, Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper, Pippa Passes, Porphyria's Lover, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society, Rabbi ben Ezra, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, Sordello (poem), The Laboratory, The Lost Leader (poem), The Ring and the Book. Excerpt: The Lost Leader is a poem by Robert Browning. It berates William Wordsworth, for what Browning considered his desertion of the liberal cause, and his lapse from his high idealism. More generally, it is an attack on any liberal leader who has deserted his cause. It is one of Browning's "best known, if not actually best, poems". William Wordsworth, the subject of the poem. Portrait by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842. From an early age, Browning (b. 1812) had been an admirer of the (early) works of Wordsworth (b. 1770). As Baker (2004) observes, Browning had sought to become "Wordsworth's radical successor", and his attitude towards Wordsworth was "a test model of a strong poet's quest for self-definition against an overbearing predecessor". The poem's lines "We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, / ... / Made him our pattern to live and to die!" refer to this. However, when he began to perceive Wordsworth sliding into conservative politics and the Church of England, he became increasingly disillusioned. Wordsworth in his early days had been a youthful rebel, defended Paine's Rights of Man and the French Revolution, and been described by Coleridge as a 'semi-atheist', and by himself as a 'patriot of the world'. However, as England went to war against France, the condition in France deteriorated, the Reign of Terror came to be, and Robespierre was executed, Wordsworth became disillusioned, and, following Southey and Coleridge, "gave up his revolutionary dreams and settled down to the life of a recluse". Browning's poem Sordello, written between 1836 and 1840, was partly aimed as a "correction" of Wordsworth's politics and poetics, but neither the audience nor Wordsworth saw this; instead the poem acquired a reputation for incomprehensibility, and Browning was called "the madman who had foisted the unreadable Sordello upon the world". For his part, Wordsworth seems to have thought very little of Browning, and one of the few recorded statements he made about B