Browning's critics and biographers never tire of recounting the original reception of Sordello. We are told again and again Tennyson's remark that only the first and last lines are intelligible and they are both false, or Mrs. Carlyle's comment that after reading the poem through she had still not discovered whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. But even more discouraging to the modern reader who wishes to take Sordello seriously is the tendency of later critics, including those otherwise friendly to Browning, to ignore the poem or pass it by with brief praise for what are sometimes called its “incidental beauties.” Sir Henry Jones, writing on Browning in the Cambridge History of English Literature, passes it by without an attempt at interpretation. Chesterton does the same in the English Men of Letters Series biography, while Phelps, conceding that “in its inmost citadel is some precious secret,” adds “but not only has no one found it, no one knows what it is.” The few studies since 1920 listed in the CBEL all deal with sources and composition, and the yearly bibliographies in PMLA since the publication of the CBEL (1941) list only one interpretive paper. DeVane, in his valuable Browning Handbook (1935), continues the study of sources and methods of composition, showing the evolution of the poem through three successive plans over a period of seven years. As might be expected, DeVane does not find the poem unified. It is, he concludes, “a bewildering potpourri of poetry, psychology, love, romance, humanitarianism, philosophy, fiction, and history.”