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Compl Wks Rbt Browning 2: With Variant Readings And Annotations (Complete Works Robert Browning)
Compl Wks Rbt Browning 2 With Variant Readings And Annotations - Complete Works Robert Browning Author:Robert Browning Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. The criticism so often quoted of the Review which laconically dismissed "Pauline" as " a piece of pure bewilderment," certainly had some grounds... more » for coming to such a decision. The discerning eye, however, might have at once recognized that it was not the bewilderment of a fool by any means, but that of a highly organized artistic temperament not yet perfectly in harmony with a mind which still groped its way among the multitude of thoughts and fancies engendered in it by the floodgates of knowledge pouring into it from many sources. Any one so endowed cannot at once get over the surprise of his own dawning powers ; the processes of his mind and the impulses of his heart are of paramount interest to him, and his first poetical outbreak is bound to have much of the subjective element in it. He does not stop to consider whether the world is as interested as he is in his own sensations, and very likely the charge of egotism will be brought and deserved. It is true that Browning has attempted to give even Pauline a dramatic cast by representing the speaker as having attained years of discretion after a long and varied series of soul-experiences, —a favorite ruse with the young writer who has experienced nothing. But what we actually have in "Pauline" is the imaginative development of a soul colored by the purely sub- jective sensations of a young man with little knowledge of life and its vicissitudes at first hand. Any organic unity the poem has is given it through the fact that the aim of this struggling soul seems to be to discover God for himself after having had all the old grounds of faith swept from under his feet. Immaturity is shown in the exaggerated moods of exaltation and despair into which the young man of the poem alternately falls, and sometimes so rap...« less