Saving Browning from His Friends:

...But Pound would have done it differently, and has...

...But it is not enough merely to explain, examine and analyze, though Professor King is a thorough enough academician in his excellent explication of Browning's major monologues, like "Andrea Del Sarto," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," and "Bishop Blougram's Apology...

...He invested the dramatic monologue with forms of internal association and disassociation, with bold break-throughs in the techniques of verse and the drama, with exacting portraits of people, a method attempted mostly by Shakespeare...

...of the University of Kansas City, who loves Robert Browning for his modern influences, has done just that...

...and so has Eliot, intent on capturing everyone for the Church...

...He has attacked the virtue seekers, the moralists, the philosophical detachers, and especially the Browning societies that contributed so much for so little when they took up the standard for Browning and indulged in moral muddling rather than in understanding the literary and psychological values inherent in Browning's major works...

...It may well be that the footnotes will save Browning for future professors if not for the multitudes who read poetry in our latter-day Renaissance...

...Pound, who borrowed as heavily as T. S. Eliot did from Browning, found him a worthwhile model to lean on as both explored nuances of the new and the old...

...Reviewed by Harry Roskolenko There are various ways of securing a poet against his friends, and Professor Roma J. King Jr...

...Like Rimbaud, who has been claimed by mystics, clergy and Communists alike, Browning had a motley host of friends...

...After all, Browning had done more for modern poetry than any single Victorian...

...But it was Ezra Pound, in his more prudent times, who first took up the defense of the disappearing Browning...

...Something else is the order of the day to save Robert Browning...

...Professor King ends his 151 pages of close reasoning and extremely helpful explanations of possible obscurities with the salutary expectation that "Browning's scope, intensity and vividness assure his being read long after his early devotees have found other and more exciting inspiration for their "positive thinking.' " Perhaps more power in the good professor's style and approach, and a touch of Menckenian anti-intel-lectualism, might help to keep Browning out of the dusty areas of explication du texte...

...Rather, it would have been more to the point, in a day of evaporating poetry, if Professor King had not been so acutely the academician...