Browning’s Now versus Carlyle’s Today

Abstract

No sooner had Browning settled into his literary career and the character of an acknowledged poet, than a new kind of misunderstanding faced him. In 1836 Landor and Wordsworth had toasted ‘the youngest poet of England’ over a literary dinner at Talfourd’s house. By the early 1840s Browning had also attracted admiration from Dickens, R. H. Horne and Forster. Thomas Carlyle, author of Sartor Resartus (1833) and The French Revolution (1837), met Browning in 1836. The satiric inventor of the ‘Philosophy of Clothes’ noticed that the young man was dandaical to a fault, but thought the poetry worth encouragement (Carlyle I, p. 4). Their friendship was to last over forty years, during which time Carlyle began by thinking that Browning had immense promise, if only he would express himself more plainly, and ended by feeling acutely disappointed in what he saw as the banal content and the riddling form of Browning’s late works. In between lay a period of acceptance in the 1840s and 1850s: Carlyle particularly praised the ‘Essay on Shelley’ and Men and Women. Browning loved Carlyle dearly but never took his views on poetry to heart. Carlyle’s personality could be loved and understood like that of the subjective poet in the ‘Essay on Shelley’: together his writing and personality made something singular and extraordinary.