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The History of Literature
705 Runaway Poets - How the Brownings Fell in Love (And Why It Matters)
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Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello, this is Jack in 2025 presenting to you an episode from our archives called the Runaway. The triumphant love story of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We will present it here in all its glory, uninterrupted. Uninterrupted, I should say by commercial sponsorship. It's from 2017 originally. And. Whoa. It was actually eight years ago to the day. I see. May 29, 2017. That was not planned. What are the odds? Has to be one in 365 and a quarter, at least. Let's ponder that for a while. Okay, I'm done pondering. Here's the episode. I hope you enjoy it. Hello, I'm Jack Wilson. Welcome to the History of Literature. Okay, let's get started. We have a wonderful episode today of wonderful topic. Two incredible poets and the way they found one another and why they needed to find one another. And there's a surprise ending. A surprise ending. Well, I can't tell you much more about that because then what would be the surprise? I'd ruin it. So we're still going ad free, and the money in the coffers is dwindling. We're down to a quarter, four pennies, few pieces of lint. But that's okay. We're happy to go commando. As my producer says. That's for you, the listener, trying to improve your listening experience. You're welcome. So, the story of the Brownings. I knew much of this, but not all of it. And people, let me just tell you that there's a surprise ending that. Well, I've said too much already. If you're like me, and you will come away from this with a due respect for both Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, they had a child, too. Pen Browning. Is that perfect or is that weird? Yes, they were poets. Yes, they were in love. And yes, the pen is an important implement. But Pen Browning isn't that kind of something you might name a pet? Isn't that how you name a pet? Name them after your favorite writing implement? Actually, they already did have a pet. They had a dog that they named Flush. Virginia Woolf was so smitten by this dog, inspired by this dog. Not that she met the dog, just the awareness of the dog. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a couple of poems about the dog Flush. Virginia Woolf was so inspired that she wrote a biography of it. A full book of Flush Browning. No, I did not make that up. She wrote the Waves and she wrote Orlando. No doubt you've Heard of those books. And in between, she literally wrote a dog about the Browning's dog called a Biography. The COVID of it says, with four original drawings by Vanessa Bell and six other illustrations. How would you like to be one of the other illustrators? Have Vanessa Bell's original drawings called out and your illustrations just anonymously ascribed six other illustrations. It reminds me of when I helped a woman write her dissertation once. I probably wrote about a third of it. I think I edited every sentence, wrote a bit of it my own, myself. She came into my office afterwards, and she was very pleased. And she showed me the dedication and the acknowledgments page. There were about 100 people on there. The members of her committee, her professors, her colleagues, several researchers, her parents, her loving husband, her kids. And I was nodding as I was reading. Oh, and I had suspected she was showing it to me because she had thanked me. Then I thought maybe she didn't realize she had forgotten to include me. I didn't see my name anywhere. So I kind of looked up at her, said, oh, this is nice. You acknowledged a lot of people, probably people who didn't do half the work that I did on this thing. And then she smiled. She pointed at the bottom where it said and numerous others. She pointed at me and she said, that's you. You were the numerous other outstanding. I was, of course, very flattered and a little anxious to be showered in so much glory, worried success might change me. Guess what? Success did not change me, because that's the kind of person I am. I went home and acted like it was just any other day. And I was just the same old me. That's called character, people. So where were we? Pen Brownie. Could that be short for something? Penelope, of course. But this was a boy in Victorian England, Pennington Penfred. I think it was just Pen, as in, we're poets, we use pens. Let's name our son Pen. Here's why I'm not going to criticize the two of them. The Brownings. They married late, and Elizabeth had four miscarriages. What a run of sorrow that is. Who am I to question a parent in the moment of the naming process? Let's give a little leeway to people. Let's give a little room. Let's open our minds, be generous in spirit. There's a villain in this story, but it isn't Elizabeth. And it's not Robert. Certainly not Penn. So here we go, off on an adventure to tell a true love story, one of history's great love stories. The story of Elizabeth Moulton Barrett and Robert Browning. Elizabeth Moulton Barrett was born in 1806. But her story really begins 150 years earlier in 1655 when her ancestors landed in Jamaica. It was there that the Barretts made their fortune as the especially her grandfather, Edward Barrett, who lived from 1734 to 1798 and owned 10,000 acres of land in northern Jamaica, included sugar plantations, mills, glassworks and ships traded between Jamaica and Newcastle. Slavery was in her background, her ancestors background. Her family benefited, profited from slave labor. That was true on her mother's side as well. Her father moved the family to England. He was trying to clean up the Barrett name. Barrett had to be the surname. He insisted on that. That was the rule. It was held so strongly that Elizabeth often signed her name Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett or just Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. Think about that. Your father wants so desperately for you to be a Barrett that your name, the way you sign your name is Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. This isn't the first time we'll see the father's punitive pride and anger play a role in Elizabeth's life. But as a young girl, she knew a different side of him as well. When she was 3, the family moved to a 500 acre estate called Hope End. This was in England. The house was converted into stables and her father built a new mansion that her mother said was like something out of the Arabian Nights. It had a Turkish design. It seems to have been sort of a palace surrounded by ponds and grottoes and kiosks, an ice house and a hothouse and an underground tunnel from the house to the gardens. So that was her world, her fantasy world, her playground. She had a pony, she went for picnics, she and her siblings. She was the oldest of 12. She and her siblings put on home plays. Sounds wonderful. She was the most bookish and the most precocious and her mother seems to have encouraged her. Her mother collected all her poems. The first we have is from when she was probably age six. And it's about impressment. Impressment topic for a six year old. Impressment, as anyone familiar with Patrick o' Brien's novels will know, is the policy of grabbing a guy off the street or Americans that you find hanging around, sending them off on a ship, like for the Navy. It's like a forced immediate draft. You hang around a tavern near a coast, there's a ship that needs sailors. You're liable to wind up at sea maybe for years. Putting your life on the line for the Navy, that's impressment. And it's pretty brutal. We have draft these days sometimes during Vietnam. Who knows, maybe it'll rise again. Even in a draft, Even the horrors of a draft, you get to say goodbye to your family. Impressment is literally Marines grab you and haul you down to the ship and you sail away. Here's the poem by the six year old. It's called on the cruelty of forcement to man alluding to the press gang. Ah, the poor lad in yonder boat Forced from his wife, his friends, his home. Now gentle maiden, how can you look at the misery of his doom? So fascinating that poem. First that she was this good but this young. It's not a bad little poem. And that she had the social reform streak. She had the empathy. She may have been living on a grand estate, but her heart was with the poor lad in yonder boat. She empathized with his plight. Is there hypocrisy there? A life made luxurious by slavery after all. Yet showing compassion for the impressed member of the press gang. I'm not going to call a six year old girl a hypocrite. But I can imagine her father. He was old enough to know. To know the hypocrisy there, the contradiction. Was he glad to see this compassion taking root in his daughter? Did he sense the tension between her feeling for the lad and the wealth the family had derived from slavery? It was a time when anti slavery attitudes in England were growing and he himself was starting to see his own fortunes decline. And slavery fell out of favor and the profits from it became more and more untenable, tainted. Here was his daughter, his oldest daughter, sympathizing with the fortunes of a man who had been taken against his will and held against his will. Was Elizabeth's father blind to this contradiction? Did he not care? Or did it take root in him? Start to eat away at him? Churn contradiction. Something. It's hard to reconcile your own self image, prosperous, happy English gentleman and those dark secrets of knowing where that money came from and what had gone into being able to sustain a fortune like that. I said her mother encouraged her poetry. But there's some evidence that Elizabeth's father encouraged her as well. When she was 12 he paid to publish her heroic epic the Battle of Marathon. A poem. She had been learning Greek. She read Homer. She had been learning Greek since the age of 10. Her father called her the poet laureate of Hope End. The name of their estate Hope End. Here's how her friend described her at this age. This was one of the Mitfords. She was friends with her friend Described her as a slight, delicate figure with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face. Large, tender eyes richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam. End quote. It's a happy picture. But not everything in her life was happy. She had an illness that she shared with her sisters. They all contracted it, except that they recovered. And Elizabeth never quite did worse. She fell off her horse and injured her head and spine. Was in a lot of pain for that. And she took laudanum for the pain. Laudanum is essentially opium and morphine. She seems to have become dependent, if not addicted. Did that help her poetry, give her visions? It's debatable, of course. Long term, it probably wiped her out, sapped her strength. The pattern of Coleridge and so many others of her era. At 15, she read Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which inspired her. But the tragedies continued to mount. One of her sisters died young. Her mother died when Elizabeth was 22. In her 30s, she got what is probably a form of tuberculosis. More illness, keeping her house bound. Her brother was killed in Jamaica, and her favorite brother Edward drowned in a sailing accident. She blamed herself for the last one. She had encouraged him to come visit her on the coast. Her father had disapproved of the trip. It ended in her favorite brother's death. And now this is probably the strangest part of the family saga. Of all the things I've mentioned, of all the crazy things going on in the Barrett household, this, I think, is the strangest. Her father declared that none of his children would ever marry. Issued kind of an edict they would be disinherited if they did. How strange that is. What would possess a man to do that? None would marry. Who says that? A tyrant. Being cruel for the sake of cruelty. A control freak. Did he worry that all the people around them were fortune seekers trying to get his money? Did he want his children to beg him, to need to be dependent on him? It is hard to imagine having 12 kids. 11 after one had died young. 11 kids. None of them will marry. What kind of a father says that? When that world Elizabeth had her poetry to turn to, she moved to London with the family. And she spent her time mostly in her room upstairs, seeing only her family. A cousin helped her get her volumes of poetry out. She was prolific. Criticism and translations. She was a committed social reformist. She condemned child labor. And again, is there a parallel there with the plight of another kind of worker? In particular is child labor here, a proxy for slaves and slave labor. I don't mean to push the point here. Child labor is an issue as well, an important issue, as we'll see. This is going to be a recurring theme for Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She was aware that she came from a slave holding past. Her ancestors had that in their call it in the West Indies. But there she is in her 30s, basically a spinster, sickly, in pain, addicted to opiates, stuck in her upstairs room under the thumb of a father who will never let her marry. That's her in her mid-30s. The tragic house, housebound poet, writing beautifully, but coming from a place that's almost a kind of prison. And then at age 38, her two volume book, poems, came out and the great adventure of her life began. The envelope from the stranger was addressed simply Ms. Barrett. 50 Wimpole street was all it said. And the return address, R. Browning, was written in a forthright hand under a penny red stamp of Queen Victoria. But inside the letter sang with joy and enthusiasm. There's barely any throat clearing at all, just the quick notation of where the author is writing. New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey. And then listen to this. Imagine a woman, our poet, living in a darkened upstairs room in her father's house under his iron grip. And listen to the way this letter goes soaring into a bright blue sky. New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey. I love your verses with all my heart. Dear Miss Barrett. That's how it begins. Not Dear Miss Barrett, we haven't met, but I'm also a poet and I wanted to write to you to tell you of my admiration for your fine poetry. No, no, not that, not that. For Robert Browning. Let's do this again. I have chills. This is breathtaking. This time I'll keep going a little longer. New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey. I love your verses with all my heart. Dear Miss Barrett. And this is no offhand complimentary letter that I shall write. Whatever else, no prompt matter, of course, recognition of your genius. And there a graceful and natural end of the thing. Since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me. For in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of my head of purely passive enjoyment, when I do really enjoy and thoroughly justify my admiration, perhaps even as a loyal fellow craftsman should try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter. But nothing comes of it all that was the first page. Here's the second page. So into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours. Not a flower of which but took root and grew. Oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat and prized highly and put in a book with a proper account at top and bottom, and shut up and put away, and the book called a Flora. Besides, after all, I need not give up the thought of doing that to you in time. Because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence. The fresh, strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought. We're almost at the end of the second page now. The paper is not large. These are small pages. The handwriting is bold. Can you hear the force of personality coming through? And just the love he has for the poetry. Robert Browning's personality comes through, but also the aching admiration. Must have been very flattering for Ms. Barrett to be reading this from a stranger, a fellow poet. And now listen to the third page. My God, this might be the greatest letter ever written in the history of the world. It has to be up there, this first letter of Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Listen to this third page as it spills onto the fourth. But in addressing myself to you, your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do as I say, love these books with all my heart. And I love you, too. Do you know, I was once not very far from seeing, really seeing you. Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning, would you like to see Ms. Barrett? Then he went to announce me. Then he returned. You were too unwell. And now it is years ago. And I feel, as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close to some world's wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered. But there was some slight, so it now seems slight and just sufficient bar to admission. And the half open door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be. Well, these poems were to be, and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself. Yours ever faithfully, Robert Browning. Wow. We are off. Nicely done, Mr. Browning. Browning does not mess around. I love these books with all my heart. And I love you, too. He read the poems a week ago. And then he thinks back to the time when he almost met her. Mr. Kenyon, that was her cousin. Mr. Kenyon said, Would you like to see Ms. Barrett? And he went to go announce him. Announce Mr. Browning. She was too unwell, of course. All those illnesses she suffered from. She was too unwell. And he thinks, this is like going to the chapel or crypt. And there's a world's wonder right there. All I have to do is push open a little screen and I'm there in the presence of the world's wonder. That's a bit of a strange analogy for a woman you've never met and of whom you believe you're in love. The world's wonder and chapel are crypt. Some of them are nice. Maybe a painting. Maybe a beautiful painting. That's a little loaded, as we'll see for Browning. Maybe it's a beautiful statue or chalice. Could also be a saint's finger. A crypt. World's wonder in the crypt. I was almost there. Then he says, I went home my thousands of miles and the sight was never to be. These poems were to be, and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself. Yours ever faithfully, Robert Browning. Wonderful. We've never met. Here he comes, convinced he loves her. He almost talks himself into it in the course of the letter. First he's just admiring the poems, talking about how much they've meant to him, how he's lived with them this past week. And then he just says, well, what the. I don't just love the poems. I love the poet. Let's be honest. And then they had an amazing correspondence. 540, some love letters they exchanged, and a courtship and a secret marriage against her father's wishes. And her father disinherited them, as he promised he would. And they moved from grey, sober London to bright and sunny and restorative Italy. He traveled from Rome and France, Rome and France, Rome and Florence. She would wonder about his early love for her. Did you love my poems or love me? It would kind of bother her. She insisted it had to be her, it couldn't be her poems. And he agreed, sort of claimed that he loved her. He also insisted that he could love her poems, too, and that loving her poems was an important part of loving her, because her poetry was an important part of her. And they got past that. They loved each other. He was a poet, too, of course. She respected his poems. When they met, she was more famous. They were both poets, both very different. I'll get to that in a moment. We'll go through some of their poems, but first I want to talk about their relationship, because they had this absolutely wonderful relationship. It's admirable. People looking to improve Their marriage or their other form of relationship, a love affair. If you're trying to figure out how to sustain it, how to make it nurturing, how to make it beneficial to both parties. Good luck to the Brownings. They told each other what they thought, even when they disagreed. They were honest, didn't cover anything up. When it came to poetry, which one imagines is the most charged aspect of their relationship. Imagine living with a poet as accomplished as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Or vice versa. Robert Browning. Imagine if that person is telling you your poems are no good. Every day, every minute of every day. Destructive, right? But here was the trick. Here was their secret. There was no sugar coating. They were critical when they thought it was deserved. But they respected each other's views, including their views of poetry. And they recognized and appreciated and valued their differences. That they were two different people writing different poems. That was the key. To disagree without trying to change a person to be more like you. Oh, I've seen that so many times. When people, whether it's a supervisor or an editor, someone in a position where they're supposed to be critic, they're supposed to be the one with the pen, crossing lines out, adding things in. Some people can only trying to make everything sound like themselves, as if they themselves had written it. So they edit and they edit and they edit. And the original author feels like unvalued might be fine for a workplace setting. You get over it, that's what you get paid for. But in a relationship, that's difficult the better, more generous writers. Often it's the ones who have more self confidence and have more respect for the original author. They edit with a different approach. They edit on the original author's terms, measured against their standards, their goals, their aims, their sensibility. It's the ability to say, well, it's. It's not my criteria for poetry that I'm going to use when I'm commenting on this, it's yours. Because I respect and value your views, poetic aims. You can apply that to poetry as well as to life. You have a recipe for a happy marriage. If I'm critical, it's not critical because I want you to be more like me. I'm critical because I know what you want for yourself. I'm going to try to help you get to that point. These two pulled it off. They were happy. They were happy to the end. Let's take a look at the poetry. Browning was famous for his dramatic monologues. We haven't talked about him too much yet. He was born in 1812, six years younger than Elizabeth. And he too wrote a book of poems at a young age. By the age of 12 he couldn't get it published, couldn't find a publisher, so he destroyed it. But soon enough he did find a publisher for another work and his early poetic career was launched with mixed success. Dante Gabriel Rossetti liked his poem, his long poem Pauline and his second book length poem Paracelsus was praised by William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens. Hard to imagine those two overlapping, kind of like Shakespeare and John Donne. It's a trick of anthologies or a trick of literary history. One seems to come after the other. There seems to be some kind of gap. And they seem like in the case of Wordsworth and Dickens, they seem like such different and distinct generations. There they are both liking Robert Browning's work. And then Browning committed the sin of writing a difficult poem called Sordello, which was viewed as being willfully obscure. That seems to have stopped him for a while. Did some soul searching after that one for several years. He didn't come out with another poetry collection. Maybe because he saw a kernel of truth in that, that he hadn't intended to be willfully obscure. When he resumed writing, his style was looser and more personal. Here's one of my favorites. It's called My Last Duchess. My Last Duchess. That's my Last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive. I call that piece a wonder. Now Fra Pandolf's hands worked busily a day and there she stands. Will it please you sit and look at her? I said Fra Pandolf by design, for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance the depth and passion of its earnest glance. But to myself they turned, since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you but I and seemed as they would ask me if they durst how such a glance came there. No, not the first. Are you to turn and ask, sir? Twas not her husband's presence only called that spot of joy into the Duchess's cheek. Perhaps Fra Pandolf chanced to say, her mantle laps over my lady's wrist. Too much or paint must never hope to reproduce the faint half flush that dies along her throat. Such stuff was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy. She had a heart, how shall I say? Too soon made glad, too easily impressed. She liked whate' er she looked on. And her looks went everywhere. Sir. Twas all one my favour. At her breast the dropping of the daylight, in the west, the bough of cherries, some officious fool broke in the orchard for her the white mule she rode with round the terrace all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech or blush. At least she thanked men good, but thanked somehow I know not how. As if she ranked my gift of a 900 years old name with anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling? Even had you skill in speech, which I have not, to make your will quite clear to such a one and say just this or that, and you disgust me. Here you miss, or there exceed the mark. And if she let herself be lessened so, nor plainly set her wits to yours, forsooth, and make excuse. E' en then would be some stooping, and I choose never to stoop. O sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene' er I passed her, but who passed without much the same smile. This grew. I gave commands. Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands, as if alive. Will't please you? Rise. We'll meet the company below. Then I repeat, the count, your master's known munificence is ample warrant that no just pretense of mine for dowry will be disallowed, Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed at starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go together. Down, sir. Notice Neptune, though taming a seahorse, thought a rarity, which Klaus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me. What a marvelous poem. Creepy. Incredibly disturbing. It starts out. Here we go. There's a portrait of old, what's her name? My last duchess. The speaker here is probably the Duke of Ferrara. And he says, only I get to look at her, only I pull this curtain back. But here, I'll show you. I'll show you her. You'll probably have the same reaction everyone else does and says, oh, she looks so happy. Look at that blush in her cheek, that spot of joy. See how she's smiling. The speaker says, oh, boy, that reminds me. Kind of smiled too much. She smiled at me like that. But she smiled at everyone like that. Kind of made a fool out of me the way she smiled at everyone. At this point, we, the readers, are squirming in our chair, just like the person who's in the room, no doubt is. We want to know the story, but the speaker is making us very uncomfortable. Seems a little jealous, a little capable of rage. That's what I want to say. Hmm. Was it really such a problem that she smiled? Had a lot of different things. Some officious fool broke a. Broke a bough of cherries for her Was that. Was that so bad? Oh, dear, look at the time. It really must be going. No, no, no, no, no, says the host. Let me tell you the story. She smiled, no doubt, when her eye passed her, but who passed without much the same smile. Oh, God. We think you are insane. You were angry that she smiled at other men. Oh, good Lord. What did you do to this poor woman? And the sociopath says this grew. I gave commands. Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands as if alive. What? What did you do? Gave commands and all smiles stopped together. Better killed. It's a little ambiguous. He doesn't come out. Come straight out and say it. But yes, Browning said in an interview, I meant that the commands were that she should be put to death, or he might have had her shut up in a convent. Guess who loved Robert Browning's poems. Edgar Allan Poe, of course. Of course he did. Has there ever been less of a surprise in the history of literature? Edgar Ally Poe loved Robert Browning's poems. Oscar Wilde did, too. He didn't think of him as a poet, really, more of a storyteller, Fiction writer. Wilde would probably appreciate the way it ends. He says, oh, here's a nice statue of Neptune taming a seahorse. Admire all the art. That portrait of the wife I had murdered. Whoops. And this grand little sea God taming a horsey. It's all the same. What, you're leaving so soon? Wilde would like the emphasis on the art, I think. Maybe. Or maybe he wouldn't be in on the joke. Certainly people have said that Portrait of Dorian Gray is based in part on this poem, the idea for it. In any case, I brought up Wilde because he had an interesting take on Browning. Browning wasn't really a poet. He was a short story writer, said Oscar Wilde. You can hear the narrative in that poem, the way it works. Like fiction, it's written in rhyming verse. Of course, poetry can claim it, but Wilde's right. Browning is the soul of a fiction writer. He sets a scene, he establishes a narrator, he conveys a story, he engages us with suspense. Here's Wilde's quote, quote. He's talking about Browning. He is the most Shakespearean creature since Shakespeare. If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths. Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As a poet. Ah, not as a poet. He will be remembered as a writer of fiction. As the most supreme writer of fiction it may be that we have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivaled. And if he could not answer his own problems. He could at least put problems forth. And what more should an artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creator of character, he ranks next to him who made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside him. The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning. And so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose. Wilde liked him so well he wrote him a letter. This is a great one that we have. Nice that this survived. Dear Mr. Browning, it says, will you accept from me the first copy of my poems, the only tribute I can offer you for the delight and the wonder which the strength and splendor of your work has given me from my boyhood, believe me, in all affectionate admiration. Very truly yours, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was a fan of Elizabeth Barrett Browning too. Here's what he said in a letter to a friend. He sent her Elizabeth Barrett Browning's book Aurora Lay, which is a huge success. Wilde writes in his letter to his friend, I send you a book and a letter. It is Aurora Lay, which I think you said you had not read. It is one of those books that written straight from the heart and from such a large heart too, never weary one because they are sincere. We tire of art, but not of nature. After all our aesthetic training, I look upon it as much the greatest work in our literature. Aurora Lee Ruskin called it the greatest long poem of the 19th century. Another success she had was Sonnets from the Portuguese, which may have been based on one of Browning's nicknames for her. Some dispute about why it was called Sonnets from the Portuguese. They seem to have been trying to trick people into thinking it was not about their lives just to maintain a little privacy. So maybe she trying to persuade people that these were translations or inspired by the Portuguese, but they came from her. And Browning had called her the Little Portuguese. It was kind of an in joke. Edgar Allan Poe liked Elizabeth Barrett Browning too. He dedicated his collection the Raven and other Poems to her. Emily Dickinson admired her. She was a great role model, a prolific poet, a woman of achievement. Showing the way. We play some greatest hits. Let's think about the most famous lines in the English language. What are your candidates for the number one most famous line in all of English poetry? To be or not to be would have to be up there, right? If you count the. The verse in a play as a poem. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Shakespeare again. Maybe a line from Keats from the Grecian urn, or maybe Tennyson. Into the valley of Death Rode the 600. What about this? How about this one? Sonnet 43 Sonnets from the Portuguese by our Ms. Barrett Browning. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Is that the most famous line ever written in poetry? I've seen some things online that has it as number one. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. The whole poem is, of course, excellent. The. It doesn't get repeated as often as the first line. Let's listen to all of it. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach when feeling out of sight for the ends of being an ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day's most quiet need. By sun and candlelight. I love thee freely as men strive for right. I love thee purely as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use in my old griefs and with my childhood faith. I love thee with a love I seem to lose with my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life. And if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. She had her man. She had her soulmate. It was time to write her love poems. And Robert young, Robert young, ardent Robert was there to take care of her. Always devoted, always in love with her mind and her talent and her personality and her sensibility, even as her illnesses and a lifetime of hardships began to overcome her. They had 15 years together and one child in between those four miscarriages. And finally, in the end, in Florence, it was Robert who was there for her. She died, he said smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl's. Her last word was beautiful. End quote. And that was it. The great poet, the social reformer, the one who campaigned against slavery in the United States, child labor, injustice toward Italian citizens. She was popular all over the world, and not just for her artistic gifts, but for the causes she had taken up. She left the world with a single final word. Beautiful. And a cynical critic jumps in. Maybe that was the opium talking. And a wild critic jumps in. How do we know Browning didn't kill her? Ha ha. As we've read his crazy poems. Yes, have your fun. Write your screenplays. I'll stick with the conventional story of the woman happy with her husband, happy with life, at the end, whispering the word beautiful. A face smiling and happy, like a girl's, beautiful, saying, life is beautiful. Maybe. Or is it what she sees of the Afterlife. The glimpse that she's given, maybe that's the beautiful vision she sees. I'm moved by either one. Beautiful. Maybe she's gazing in the face of her husband. The mystery. There's one last mystery for us to unpack. Why in the world did her father not want her or any of his children to marry? I think there can only be one answer. Just keep in mind that this is historically disputed. Don't take this as proven. In fact, when someone is that twisted, I look for some serious force that's capable of applying such a twist. What cranked him into that contorted position? To have 12 children of your own but not want any grandchildren? It's against human nature. Human nature is to survive. That's what kids do. That's what errors are. They continue. You're aware. Everyone's aware. Human condition is that we're aware of death. Only a couple ways to cheat death. Not counting the cryogenic way. Talking about cheating death through fame, that's the Pericles way. Living on beyond one's life through living on the lips of men, through great works or through living on through one's children, children and grandchildren. You pass things down that way. He had 11 children. He said, don't get married. You're not allowed. If you do, I'll disinherit you. Why? Historians, or at least some historians now, think it was because of shame. Shame at his family and his slave owning past. The slaves in Jamaica had risen up and it shocked Elizabeth's father and her uncle and they began treating the slaves more humanely. But they still owned them, still felt the guilt as their nation, people around them decided that enough was enough. Slavery was an abomination that needed to end. Elizabeth said, it is a good thing I do not believe in curses. Speaking of her family, believing that her family would be cursed for its past. And her father must have done some reflecting on this as well, knowing that for all he tried to make the Barret name clean, the Barrett name was not clean. And the evidence of that here is where I am speculating. I don't know that her father thought this, but the evidence of that doesn't seem outrageous. The evidence of that was in his children as well. Like Elizabeth with her dark curls, Elizabeth herself believed that she was descended from a long line of plantation owners and slaves. The affairs that they had, there's some euphemism there went back generations in her family on both sides. Elizabeth with the dark curls. Did her father see her and her siblings as darker than he believed a Barrett should Be. Is that why, with some poisonous combination of racism and guilt and shame and disgust, he thought his line should end. The Barrett line should end with his 11 kids, none of whom he wanted to marry. Could that really be what happened? On the other hand, what else could it be? Could anything else drive a man to take such a weird and hostile position? Is this how we're supposed to read Elizabeth's poem the Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point, written after. Remember, she believed she was part slave, that it was in her background, her ancestor, her ancestry. Her father, she knew, was a slave owner. Then he imposed his will on her. She had run away to Italy with her secret husband, Robert Browning. Then she wrote a poem about a runaway slave. And it begins, I stand on the mark beside the shore of the first white pilgrim's bended knee, where exile turned to ancestor and God was thanked for liberty. I have run through the night, my skin is as dark. I bend my knee down on this mark I look on the sky and the sea. She once wrote in a letter to a friend, you think a woman has no business with the question of slavery? Then she had better use a pen. No more. Of course, this poem. There's element of anti slavery and anti. Element of social reform in the poem that has nothing to do with Elizabeth herself. I'm not saying the whole poem should be read autobiographically, but it's not hard to wonder if her father felt the sting of his Barretts, the sting of seeing his children as a stigma tainted by slavery. And if Elizabeth knew that this was why she couldn't marry, because of the disgust her father felt. And if she had always viewed her own past as being descended from slaveholders and the product of their encounters with slaves, she viewed that as part of her ancestry. Wouldn't she put herself in this poem where the exile turned to ancestor? Wouldn't that help her identify with the runaway slave? Here's how she described herself to a friend. They had corresponded for three years and had never seen one another, and the man suggested they exchange portraits. And she writes, I mean to try to be remembered by my soul rather than by my body, yet to give scanty data to your fancy. Thus I am little and black like Sappho, dark hair and complexion, fascinating. And in the face of that tormented father who caused so much pain to others and to his family, we don't know what was in his mind, not for sure. Just as we don't know if Elizabeth's poem was a direct rebuke aimed at him or if he took it that Way, we can only look at her wonderful works, the influence and inspiration she provided to her husband for his wonderful works, and the beautiful lives that they live together in a kind of happiness and fever of creativity. Italy was good to them, even if her father had not been. She thrived in Italy, and she thrived in her marriage and the world, the world who knew her through her poetry. The Edgar Allan Poe's and the Oscar Wildes and the Virginia Woolfs and the Emily Dickinsons and all the rest of us, we her readers. Her father may have been hell bent on extinguishing his own family, but he couldn't destroy the love that she found in her marriage. And he didn't snuff out the light of her poems. I'll stand with Robert and Edgar and Emily and a million others and say, we love your poems, dear miss Barrett, and we love you, too. That's gonna do it for this episode of the History of Literature. Gar, should we put a portrait of you on the wall? Maybe behind a curtain? Oh, you weren't even listening, were you? Ah, well, hopefully some of the listeners were. They'll pick up on that. We're very glad to have our listeners, aren't we, Gar? More work. How do the listeners make this more work? How? Do you have any idea how this all works? It scales. We record it once and the world can listen. It doesn't matter if there's one listener or a million. It's the same amount of work. Zero. You want zero listeners? I suppose that would be less work if we didn't have a podcast at all. Gar, why don't you go home early today? Maybe you can finish that sandwich you started yesterday. It's still in your jacket. Yeah. In your pocket. Okay. Thanks again, everyone. We have no ads today, so please subscribe, visit, review, tell your friends. Do all that stuff on your own own. You're on your own honor system today. We're putting you on the honor system today. Seriously, we're very grateful for each and every one of you. Once we exceed one listener, that is 0 to 1, that's just work. After that, it's all gravy. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. It's sa.