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Browning's Knowledge of Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Herbert Eveleth Greene
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Extract

That Robert Browning, the poet, possessed wide and multifarious learning is evident to a casual reader of his poems. The careful reader is impressed by the range and extent of his learning which includes much of what is called hole-in-the-corner knowledge, a familiarity with out-of-the-way topics and incidents that few readers possess. The scholarship of the past two decades has begun to give us a good deal of knowledge upon the nature of Browning's learning, and we are in a fair position now to estimate how much of the poet's knowledge was systematic and well-ordered, and how much of it was haphazard and based upon a following-up of this or that temporary interest. The letter which is the heart of this paper and which is published for the first time below will shed light upon this problem in an area in which Browning's training was probably most systematic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 62 , Issue 4 , December 1947 , pp. 1095 - 1099
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947

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References

1 Pages from an Unwritten Diary (London, 1914), p. 176.

2 See, for example, Griffin and Minchin, Life of Robert Browning (London, 1910), passim; and DeVane, Browning's Parleyings (New Haven, 1927), Ch. vn, “The Parleying with Charles Avison,” as well as numerous scattered references in Browning's correspondence. See especially, T. L. Hood, Letters of Robert Browning (New Haven, 1933).

3 Professor Greene was professor of English at The Johns Hopkins University from 1893 to 1925. He died on September 3, 1942. The present paper, in a more extended form, entitled “An Unpublished Letter by Browning,” was read at a meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1924. The present form of the paper is mainly owing to the editorial work of William Chase Greene, of the Department of Classics of Harvard University, and William C. DeVane of Yale University.