Description

The English first edition of Dramatis Personæ was published in May 1864, with the American first edition appearing hard on its heels in the following September. This was the second of the two great collections of Robert Browning's middle years--the first, Men and Women, having appeared nine years previously. The new collection, with its inspired general title (which Browning seems to have hit upon only weeks before the publication of the English first edition), was certainly an extraordinary imaginative and technical achievement: the poems are remarkable for their modernity of subject matter and close psychological interest, as well as their assertive individuality of conception. An outstanding feature is the inventive handling of tone, as for example in 'Apparent Failure'. Browning seems to have regarded the collection very much as a continuation and development of Men and Women, with its varied, contrasting dramatic lyrics and dramatic-argumentative poems. As in the earlier collection, the great majority of the poems are essentially 'dramatic' in conception.