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Browning and the Question of Myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Langbaum
Robert Langbaum*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
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Extract

The history of criticism is largely the history of the changing questions we ask about works of art. The pre-eminence in our time of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, and the connection of these writers with an artistic method and a mode of thought that Eliot, in reviewing Joyce's Ulysses, has himself called mythical—all this leads me to ask about Browning's use of myth. The question seems particularly relevant since Yeats and Browning had in common an intense admiration for Shelley. Now Yeats, we know, admired not Shelley the Godwinian radical, but Shelley the Platonist and mythmaker—the Shelley who, in the manner of Blake, used archetypal symbols. The question is whether Browning—who did for a time admire Shelley the Godwinian radical—had affinities also with Shelley the mythmaker and (the two terms are inextricably connected) symbolist.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 7 , December 1966 , pp. 575 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 See W. B. Yeats, “The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry,” Essays and Introductions (New York, 1961).

2 The “Essay on Shelley” is quoted from the “Florentine Edition” of Browning's Works, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (New York, 1898), xii, 299. Browning's verse is quoted from the Centenary Edition of his Works, introductions by F. G. Kenyon, 10 vols. (London, 1912).

3 The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846 (New York and London, 1899), 20 March 1845, i, 45.

4 All this has been made abundantly clear by W. C. De-Vane in his excellent essay, “Browning and the Spirit of Greece,” Nineteenth-Century Shidies, ed., Herbert Davis et al. (Ithaca, N. Y., 1940), as well as in his Browning's Parleyings (New Haven, Conn., 1927), and his Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York, 1955).

5 Letters R.B.-E.B.B., 13 January 1845, i, 6.

6 See, for example, Kerényi's “Prolegomena” to C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, trans. R. F. C. Hull, rev. ed. (New York and Evanston, Ill.: Harper Torchbooks, 1963).

7 See DeVane, “Browning and the Spirit of Greece,” Nineteenth-Century Studies, pp. 485-490.

8 Letters R.B.-E.B.B., i, 46

9 Letters R.B.-E.B.B. [7 March 1846], i, 539.

10 Quoted in W. G. Collingwood, The Life of John Ruskin (Boston and New York, 1902), pp. 164-165.

11 George Chapman (London, 187S), pp. 16-17. For a detailed analysis of associationism and speed in Browning, see Robert Preyer, “Two Styles in the Verse of Robert Browning,” ELH, xxxii (March 1965), 62-84.

12 See Blake's poem, “With happiness stretched across the hills,” in the letter to Thomas Butts [22 November 1802].

13 Browning's Parleyings, p. 53.

14 For an elaboration of Browning's argument, see Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York, 1956). “The Greeks,” Clark concludes, “perfected the nude in order that man might feel like a god, and in a sense this is still its function, for although we no longer suppose that God is like a beautiful man, we still feel close to divinity in those flashes of self-identification when, through our own bodies, we seem to be aware of a universal order” (p. 370).

15 Browning's Parleyings, pp. 185-193.

16 To Dr. F. J. Furnivall, 11 October 1881, Letters of Robert Browning, Collected by Thomas J. Wise, ed. T. L. Hood (New Haven, Conn., 1933), p. 200. Browning's argument would be stronger if he had not confused Darwinian theory with the Lamarckian, which actually does find intelligence in the evolutionary process.

17 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

18 Letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, 4 January 1939, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London, 1954), p. 922.

19 Introduction to Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (London, 1935), p. xiii.

20 Cambridge, Mass., 1937, pp. 365-366.