Robert Browning (New Readings)

Robert Browning would have liked his poetry to have been read anew--at least in theory. For he himself was a radical rereader. The revisionary impulse in his writing is very strong indeed. His restless, ambitious and often extraordinarily difficult work self-consciously impresses its distinctive mark on received poetic traditions. With these points in mind, one of his finest modern critics has argued that, in several related senses, Browning wrote a 'poetry of the future'. It is a richly suggestive phrase. To a large degree Browning's extensive corpus of poems and plays is certainly structured on a principle of 'futurity' or 'disclosure': they resist endings, constantly seeking new beginnings, eagerly anticipating events to come.Joseph Bristow is the author of 'Robert Browning (New Readings)' with ISBN 9780312067748 and ISBN 0312067747.