Robert Browning

Summary

Naxos AudioBooks continues its Great Poets series with this selection from the works of Robert Browning.

Robert Browning was a romantic poet in every sense of the word. He was an ardent lover who wooed the poet Elizabeth Barrett despite fierce opposition from her tyrannical father, while as a poet—inheriting the mantle of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley—he sought to show, in the Romantic tradition, man’s struggle with his own nature and the will of God.

Robert Browning’s popular poems “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” and “How They Brought the Good News” are often anthologized, but it is in his dramatic lyrics such as “My Last Duchess” and the chilling “Porphyria’s Lover” that his poetic genius shines. Browning, with his unusual use of language, can be a challenging poet, but one who is always rewarding. This selection shows the many imaginative facets of this often neglected Victorian poet.

Contents include the following poems:

1. How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix
2. Life in a Love
3. A Light Woman
4. The Statue and the Bust
5. My Last Duchess
6. The Confessional
7. A Grammarian’s Funeral
8. The Pied Piper of Hamelin
9. ‘You should have heard the Hamelin people…’
10. The Lost Leader
11. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
12. The Laboratory
13. Porphyria’s Lover
14. Evelyn Hope
15. Home Thoughts from Abroad
16. Pippa’s Song