Donald S. Hair – författare

One of the chief characteristics of nineteenth-century poetics was a tendency to test the conventions and techniques of literary genres by shifting, modifying, and combining various styles and forms. Browning fully exploited these changes, because his interests and purposes as a poet seemed to demand more of the lyric, the dramatic, and the narrative than these kinds had traditionally been able to perform. His fascination was with the development of the individual soul and he was determined to evoke in his readers his own insights into the complexity of human concerns; thus he became a constant experimenter with genre. Browning never felt that any experiment, however unsatisfactory the result, was wasted effort; each direction tried made him better prepared to attempt another.

This book explores the kinds and modes with which he worked and describes the nature of the experiments he made, concentrating on the earlier poetry and in particular on The Ring and the Book. Professor Hair is sensitive to Browning''s work, and his criticism is a model of understanding, warm appreciation, and critical good sense.

What are the influences that shaped the language used by one of the nineteenth century''s greatest writers? How did his religious beliefs, the books he owned, the paintings and music he loved, affect almost sixty years'' output of poems, plays, essays, and letters?

This book attempts to define Browning''s understanding of the nature and use of words and syntax by considering not only a full range of texts from the 1833 Pauline to the 1889 Asolando, but also the ideas important to Browning, the historical context in which he lived, and the other artistic passions that played a part in his life.

In this companion volume to Tennyson''s Language, Donald Hair establishes Browning''s place at the crossroads between empirical and idealist traditions and explains his "double view" of language, arguing that both Locke and the Congregationalists found language to be at the same time empty and a God-given essential. The Victorian age''s anti-theatrical bias, which Browning came to share, and his reading of predecessors, principally Quarles, Bunyan, Donne, and Smart, also shaped his understanding of the diction of poetry.

Hair conceives of Browning''s language as a theoretical whole, encompassing words, genres, rhyme, syntax, and phonetics. He also links Browning''s interest in music with his rhyming, the most essential and characteristic feature of his prosody, and relates his interest in painting to the interpretation of the visual image in the emblem and in typology.