★★★★☆ Repays effort

Selected Poems

Robert Browning, Daniel Karlin (editor)

There are treasures to be found in Robert Browning's poetry but don't expect them to be laid out for you like the candies at the grocery store cash register. Browning is famously obscure. In his introduction to Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) by Browning Robert Daniel Karlin tells this story

Tennyson said that there were only two lines in [Browning's Sordello] that he understood, the first – ‘Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told’ – and the last – ‘Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told’ – and that both were lies,

which is unkind, but still pretty funny.

This Penguin Classics edition is a well-put-together book, as Penguin Classics always are in my experience. After a brief (3 pages) introduction, we dive right into the poems, in publication order, with the exception of the final poem, which serves as a kind of epitaph. There are notes after the poems themselves, which are a big help in understanding Browning's obscurities, if you read them. I add the caveat because they are not footnoted or linked to the poems in any way. In the kindle edition you can easily miss that every poem is annotated, sometimes extensively. I would advise readers to read the notes for each poem immediately before or after the poem itself, although you will have to manually flip back there to find them.

Some of the poems are brief, but the ones I liked most were the long story-telling monologs put in the mouths of fictional characters. The longest of these are novellas in verse. My favorites among these were probably "Clive", simply because it's a good story, and "Mr Sludge, 'The Medium'", which is an extraordinarily penetrating portrait of a scoundrel -- a charlatan who pretends to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Karlin's notes tell us that this monolog is based on a real person. Browning was nobody's fool. At 1525 lines "Mr Sludge" is, I believe, the longest poem in this collection.

Despite all Karlin's help, Browning is not easy to read. In my review of another difficult book, Cat Valente's In the Night Garden, I wrote these words

I have mixed feelings about this. It is not just that she offers rewards proportionate to the work she demands. More than that, the demand itself makes the reward greater. Having worked for something makes the thing more precious than something given for nothing.

They will do as well for Browning.

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