Inspirational Quotations by Robert Browning (English Poet)

Robert Browning (1812–89) was a prolific Victorian-era poet and playwright. His complex psychological novel is the forerunner of modern fiction’s obsession with unreliable narrators and shifting narrative perspectives.

Born in Camberwell, London, Browning was an intelligent child. He was deeply influenced by his father’s wide-ranging collection of more than 6,000 books in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish.

By the time he was five, Browning could read and write well. He was a big fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley and asked for all of Shelley’s works for his thirteenth birthday. By the age of fourteen, Browning had learned Latin, Greek, and French.

Browning is widely recognized as a master of dramatic, evocative monologues, and psychological portraiture. His major work, Men and Women (1855), contains his greatest dramatic monologues, such as “Love Among the Ruins,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” and “Bishop Bloughram’s Apology.”

Browning is best-known for the children’s poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” His distinguished poem The Ring and the Book (1868–69) is a 21,000-line poem in four volumes derived from a 17th-century Roman murder trial. The story unfolds in the form of unreliable and incomplete claims and accusations of nine speakers. In this work, Browning achieved a confusing yet informative relativity of perception that served to reiterate that experience is never distinct from who we are and how we see.

Browning was married to the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

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