Browning both denied and affirmed the value of biography for an understanding of literature. This book narrates the development of his controversial creative life through responses to his work by five key nineteenth-century figures: John Stuart Mill, William Charles Macready, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. It also relates Browning's sense of literary vocation to Victorian publishing. Browning emerges as a writer vividly engaged with contemporary assumptions, yet deeply aware of the unaccountability of writing.

In this book colour words as used in the poetry of Keats, Browning and Hopkins become crucial indicators of a way of looking at the nineteenth-century world. The author traces the forging of language that mediates between a system of values and the flux of experience.

First published in 1972. Browning was a keen observer and dramatic recorder of nineteenth-century European culture; his poetry reflects a wide range of intellectual, religious and artistic issues of his day. Roy E. Gridley shows here that during the six decades of Browning’s active writing career (1832-89), his poetry is a record and an interpretation of the changing modes of thought, feeling and expression of nineteenth-century life. Browning was a ‘romantic’ who, by virtue of his realistic and often revolutionary poetry, became a ‘modern’, and had considerable influence on writers such as Yeats, Eliot and Pound. While surveying the whole of Browning’s life and work, Gridley focuses closely on the more famous poems, examining them as documents that give the general reader a deeper appreciation of the richness and diversity of life in Victorian Europe.