The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, in Sixteen Volumes: Pauline - Sordello; Paracelsus - Strafford; Pippa Passes, King Victor and King Charles, The Return of the Druses, A Soul's Tragedy; A Blot in the 'scutcheon, Colombe's Birthday, Men and Women; Dr…

Complete in sixteen volumes. Half leather: red leather spines and corners, marbled boards and endpapers, gilt titles and rules, top edges gilt. Several volumes include engraved frontispieces. About the author: "Robert Browning (May 7, 1812 - December 12, 1889) was a British poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Browning's fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the speaker's character. Unlike a soliloquy, the meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently 'gives away' about himself in the process of rationalizing past actions, or 'special-pleading' his case to a silent auditor in the poem. Rather than thinking out loud, the character composes a self-defense which the reader, as 'juror,' is challenged to see through. Browning chooses some of the most debased, extreme and even criminally psychotic characters, no doubt for the challenge of building a sympathetic case for a character who doesn't deserve one and to cause the reader to squirm at the temptation to acquit a character who may be a homicidal psychopath. One of his more sensational monologues is 'Porphyria's Lover.' The opening lines provide a sinister setting for the macabre events that follow. It is plain that the speaker is insane, as he strangles his lover with her own hair to try and preserve for ever the moment of perfect love she has shown him. Yet it is by carefully reading the far more sophisticated and cultivated rhetoric of the aristocratic and civilized Duke of 'My Last Duchess,' perhaps the most frequently cited example of the poet's dramatic monologue form, that the attentive reader discovers the most horrific example of a mind totally mad despite its eloquence in expressing itself. The duchess, we learn, was murdered not because of infidelity, not because of a lack of gratitude for her position, and not, finally, because of the simple pleasures she took in common everyday occurrences. She's reduced to an objet d'art in the Duke's collection of paintings and statues because the Duke equates his instructing her to behave like a duchess with 'stooping,' an action of which his megalomaniacal pride is incapable. In other monologues, such as 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' Browning takes an ostensibly unsavory or immoral character and challenges us to discover the goodness, or life-affirming qualities, that often put the speaker's contemporaneous judges to shame. In 'The Ring and the Book' Browning writes a modern epic poem in which he justifies the ways of God to humanity through twelve extended blank verse monologues spoken by the principals in a trial about a murder case remarkably like that of the 20th-century-ending O. J. Simpson trial in America. These monologues greatly influenced many later poets, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the latter singling out in his Cantos Browning's convoluted psychological poem about a frustrated 13-century troubador, Sordello, as the poem he must work to distance himself from. Ironically, Browning's style, which seemed modern and experimental to Victorian readers, owes much to his love of the seventeenth century poems of John Donne with their abrupt openings, colloquial phrasing and irregular rhythms. But he remains too much the prophet-poet and descendant of Percy Shelley to settle for the conceits, puns, and verbal play of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His is a modern sensibility, all too aware of the arguments against the vulnerable position of one of his simple characters, who recites: "God's in His Heaven; All's right with the world." Browning essentially endorses such a position because he sees an immanent deity that, far from remaining in a transcendent heaven, is indivisible from temporal process, assuring that in the fullness of...