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Podcast: The Daily Poem
Episode: Robert Browning's "Love Among the Ruins"
Description: Robert Browning (7 May 1812 â 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him among the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax. His career began well, but shrank for a time. The long poems Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) were acclaimed, but in 1840 Sordello was seen as wilfully obscure. His renown took over a decade to return, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. In 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett and went to live in Italy. By her death in 1861 h...