Robert Browning

Robert Browning (1812-1889) was a brilliant English poet. His mother was an fervent evangelical and his father was a clerk in the Bank of England.

Robert Browning acquired a tremendous education as the result of homeschooling:^[1]

Indeed, most of the poet's education came at home. He was an extremely bright child and a voracious reader (he read through all fifty volumes of the Biographie Universelle) and learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian by the time he was fourteen. He attended the University of London in 1828, the first year it opened, but left in discontent to pursue his own reading at his own pace. This somewhat idiosyncratic but extensive education has led to difficulties for his readers: he did not always realize how obscure were his references and allusions.

Browning married a more celebrated poet at the time, Elizabeth Barrett, in 1846. After her death in 1861, Browning's work reached its peak with Collected Poems (1862), Dramatis Personae (1863), and The Ring and the Book (1868-9).

He died on the same day of publication of his final volume of verse, Asolando, and is buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, an honor bestowed only on the most distinguished Englishmen.

References[edit]

1. ↑ http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/rbbio.html