Robert Browning : Husband of Elizbeth Barrett Browning, & vice versa .

1. Robert Browning: Husband of Elizbeth Barrett Browning, & vice versa. • The opening ¶ of our edition’s introduction to R..B. is very useful. • Browning deliberately separated himself from the cult of celebrity • himself one of the great love-hero characters in history. • elements of Arthurian (esp. Shalott) • beside his romantic courtship of E.B.B., he was perfectly content in admitting hers the superior poetic genius. • R.B.’s dramatic poems are characterised by taking the form of dialogues, but revealing the character and wider meaning allusively and “accidently”– found meaning. • his ‘speakers’ are morally-ambiguous, even dubious, people: adding to the separation between author, speaker & reader.

2. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” • Explictly from Shakespeare’s King Lear (madness, depression, demonic landscape, Albion, ad infinitum.) • “Childe” = knight-errancy (also “Roland” vid. M.F. La Chanson de Roland) • we are gradually working up to an explanans for the Victorian’s use of the Arthurian. • Dream-literature (R.B. declared the poem came in a dream, complete. • Pilgrim’s Progress – allegory of Faith (here, under Darwinism) • Nightmare / Freud. • no determination by R.B. on the ontology of evil

3. “Childe Roland”—Impressionism”association, sensation, mood, observer • Very difficult to argue that any plausible valid interpretation in wrong. • Mine is the best one, of course…. • As wide a range of possibility as a life experience of the reader or the nature of Life.

4. Gustave Doré: from Dante’s Inferno, canto XIII • Dante & Virgil in the 7th circle of Hell, containing those who did violence: • They come to a wood, the 2nd round circle, those who commited violence against themselves. • "Not green the foliage, but of colour dusky; not smooth the branches, but gnarled and warped; apples none were there, but withered sticks with poison."