Wayne Gretzky: A Modern Outlier

A Robert Browning Biography

Robert Browning’s response to Victorian readers was his motivation to write poetry. Early Victorian readers were taken by the themes of sex, madness and violence. His poem “Porphyria’s Lover” was a poem about a man who relives the night that he killed his wife. Victorian readers fell in love with the poem and helped Robert Browning become a famous poet. Today, he is considered one of England’s greatest poets.

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, England to Robert and Sarah Browning during the Victorian Age. He learned most of his education from his parents. At the age of 14, it is believed he had learned Latin, Greek and French. He was inspired to write poetry after he read poetry by Percy Shelley and he declared himself a devotee of the poet. All of his day to day needs and cost of his early publications of poems were all supplied by his mother and father. He wrote dramatic poetry with his controversial verse, rhyme and symbol. In “Poetry for Students” the author states that, “The poem’s themes of sex, violence, and madness were of particular interest to Victorian readers, who reveled in sensational tales of horror and depravity despite societal condemnation of all things immoral.” (Hact 150) This shows that people in Robert Browning’s time period were fascinated with themes of madness, sex and violence which Browning used in his poetry. A poet named Elizabeth Barrett read and admired his poetry, even going so far as to link him to Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth as one of the great poets of his age. He continued to write poetry but not as much as he was busy making arrangements for his frail wife who fell ill and later died in 1849, 3 years after the married. Robert took in account his so...

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...ders in the Victorian times. He self-educated himself and uses his education to use when he writes his poems. “Porphyria’s Lover” is an example of the Themes madness, love and violence in which the Victorians loved and proclaimed him as one of England’s greatest poets. Uma Kukathas has high remarks of Browning and his motivation to write poetry for the Victorians. Robert Browning motivation to become a poet shows throughout his poetry and his life as his is considered one of the greatest poets to ever grace earth.

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. “Porphyia’s Lover.” Poem Hunter n.p. n.d. Web. 20 February 2014.

"Porphyria’s Lover." Poetry for Students. Ed. Anne Marie Hacht. Vol. 15. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002. 149-168. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Uma Kukathas, Critical Essay on “Porphyria’s Lover,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.