“Since when was genius found respectable?” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

It’s her birthday today.

I have a beautiful red-leather bound copy of The Complete Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, bought at a second-hand store. The publication date is 1882, with a foreword by Mrs. Browning herself. She died in 1861, so this is obviously a reprint (her husband Robert Browning was responsible for bringing out a lot of her work posthumously), but a beautiful book from another time and era. The pages have that slick texture old books have, with the print clearly indented into the page. The print is dauntingly small, but it’s a beautiful object, and I am pleased it is in my library.

You can’t believe how prolific she was. Some of her poems are 200 pages long. Ma’am, I just can’t do it. She certainly wrote Sonnets and shorter poems, but the focus and intensity it must have taken to write an “Aurora Leigh”, is difficult to contemplate.

She was born in 1806. Her father encouraged her in her early gift for verse. She published her first epic poem at the age of 14. In her 30s, she published a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, as well as a collection of poems in 1844 which made her famous. She was sickly, perhaps on the road to spinster-hood, but enter poet Robert Browning, who read her collection of poems and set out to woo and win her. He succeeded. Her father disapproved, though, so the two eloped in 1846. It is all extremely and legendarily romantic. Their correspondence was eventually published in full. With lines like: “If it will satisfy you that I should know you, love you, love you – why then indeed … You should have my soul to stand on if it could make you stand higher.” I mean …

Both were famous, but Browning, with his long narrative poems in different voices (so funnily aped by AS Byatt in her book Possession) was more famous, his only rival being Tennyson. I feel like her fame is now greater than his (and I’m not sure that’s exactly fair.) She wrote some immortal lines, one of my favorites from “Aurora Leigh”:

For God in cursing gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction.

Sometimes I think, “Fuck you, Barrett, that’s not true!” And it isn’t, not always. You know, people fleeing war, living in refugee camps, marching into gas chambers, etc … But sometimes I have to admit she was right.

She was famous enough that her name was mentioned as a possible poet laureate after William Wordsworth died. The job went to Tennyson, but it shows you her standing! Both Wordsworth and Tennyson were admirers.

And then there is … Ezra Pound. Who tended to insinuate himself in everywhere. Pound wrestled with his influences, although … reading his work, it’s hard to discern those influences?? Like his poetic confrontation with Walt Whitman, practically challenging him to a duel while also proclaiming his love. I am not a scholar but I fail to see any influence of Whitman on Pound but never mind. Pound wrote a Canto addressed to Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Ezra Pound, from the Cantos

And I discern your story : Browning’s
Peire Cardinal “Bordello”
Was half fore-runner of Dante. Arnaut’s the trick
Of the unfinished address,

And half your dates are out; you mix your eras
For that great font, Sordello sat beside —
‘Tis an immortal passage, but the font? —
Is some two centuries outside the picture

And no matter.

… the “and no matter” matters. Browning’s “dates” are “out”. In other words, she mixed eras in her poems, she screwed up chronology. Pound is disappointed and angry, but then he gives it all to her, with “And no matter”.

So many of her poems are dreadfully long, honestly, and there is much I have not read (and will not read, sorry). But her sonnets are amazing love poems, not just to her man, but to Wordsworth, George Sand, her dog, death, etc.). Here’s one:
Love

We cannot live, except thus mutually
We alternate, aware or unaware,
The reflex act of life: and when we bear
Our virtue onward most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be
Most instantly compellant, certes, there
We live most life, whoever breathes most air
And counts his dying years by sun and sea.
But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both make
mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole
And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,
As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

QUOTES:

L.M. Montgomery, journal entry:

I don’t care a hoot for Mrs. Browning.

lol

William Wordsworth, on hearing of the marriage:

“Well, I hope they understand one another – nobody else would.”

Robert Browning, 1871:

The simple truth is that she was the poet, and I the clever person by comparison.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

She was quite rapidly forgotten after her death in 1861, apart from the Sonnets From the Portuguese (1850) which she dedicated to her husband and in which the traditionally male preserve of the love sonnet became a new kind of instrument, capable of quite unexpected tonalities … Those tonalities sound in many of the love poems. Who – male or female – before her wrote in this manner?

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Feminist criticism has focused attention upon the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett, rather at the expense of her husband, Robert Browning, who nevertheless abides as one of the greatest poets in the language. I venture that academic fashion will wane (it always does) and the aesthetic inadequacies of Barrett Browning’s long poem, Aurora Leigh (1856), and of the famous Sonnets from the Portuguese (addressed to Robert, who thought she looked Portuguese) again will be apparent. Very bad also is Barrett Browning’s “The City of the Children,” where the sentiments are admirable but the expression is wearisome. In an occasional lyric, like “A Musical Instrument,” given here, Elizabeth Barrett catches fire.

He is sometimes invaluable and yet he is also sometimes a bore!

Jeanette Winterson, “Writer, Reader, Words”:

The woman poet, unlike the majority of the woman novelists, accepted her mantle of Otherness gracefully. She would lead the mind to higher things. She would redirect material energies towards emotional and spiritual contemplation. LEL (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Felicia Hemans, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, each accepted the distinction of the poet as poet.

George Orwell, “As I Please” column, November 24, 1944

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is supposed to have been taken in by the famous medium Home, but Browning himself saw through him at a glance and wrote a scarifying poem about him (Sludge the Medium).

Hart Crane, letter to a friend, and fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning…I can only say I do not greatly care for Mme. Browning.

Michael Schmidt:

Robert looms so large that he occludes Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She deserves limelight, not as the object of his romantic attention but as a significant poet herself. In her time she was prolific and very highly thought of; he lived rather in her shadow, whatever adjustments posterity has made.

Virginia Woolf (whose novel, Flush, is the story of EBB, as seen through the eyes of EBB’s dog):

[One of those] rare writers who risk themselves adventurously and disinterestedly in an imaginative life.

Michael Schmidt:

How much more than her husband she trusts in the value of vowels, how much closer to Tennyson her music; yet Giulio’s seductive sophistries, which the speaker wishes to believe and we believe too, are the sophistries of a shared love and not of a seducer. There is a sexual complicity in the joy of her love poems, as though the man and the woman understandingly in love are on the same side of the language.

I’m starting to see a theme. We’re supposed to choose between them, I guess?

Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to R.W. Dixon, December, 1881:

The Brownings may be reckoned to the Romantics.

Michael Schmidt:

Ezra Pound loved Browning as only poets love – with jealousy and disappointment…What Pound loves in Browning is Italy and the play of voices (which Pound learns to weave together in the Cantos. “Sordello” is the threshold over which Pound passes, at last, into his great, contested work. It was in part Browning who made it possible for Pound to make peace with another voice of which he is made, his American precursor Walt Whitman. He resented and resisted Whitman; he read again, and resisted, but at last he makes a pact … For good or ill, Pound was made of Whitman, the American cadences ring in his ears.

Camille Paglia, “Love Poetry”:

…Victorian poetry, as typified by the Brownings, exalts tenderness, fidelity, and devotion, the bonds of married love, preserved beyond the grave.

Clasped Hands of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1853, by sculptor Harriet Goodhue Hosmer

 
 
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