Dramatic Monologues

This selection gathers Robert Browning's persona poems, in which a speaker addresses a silent listener and, while arguing or confessing, reveals more than he intends. The voices include Renaissance painters, jealous husbands, bishops, mediums, doctors, and figures from scripture or legend. Settings run from Italian palaces and studios to laboratories, cloisters, and imagined islands. Typical subjects are art, faith, sexual power, and self-justification. There is no continuous plot: the volume is a gallery of dramatic speeches, among them such poems as My Last Duchess, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto, and Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

Quarter bound in dark red cloth, white paper boards with a pattern in pink and brown by Shirly Smith. Cream endleaves. Pale brown slipcase.