The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XVI — (1999)

With Variant Readings and Annotations

By Robert Browning
Edited by Susan Crowl, Roma A. King and Jr.

“The Ohio edition offers a virtual rare bookroom full of texts for any Browning poems where the determined critic can trace the author’s changing intentions and craft.”

Victorian Poetry

“The Ohio [Browning] is everything a reader could wish.”

English

Robert Browning wrote Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day in his seventy-third year. The work is a capstone to the poet's long career, encompassing autobiography as well as influences bearing on the poet's life and career and on Victorian thought and culture in general. One of Browning's most complex works, Parleyings is also a work essential to understanding his genius and career as a whole. The Ohio/Baylor Browning edition offers keys to the complexity and interest of Parleyings through a definitive, emended text, full annotations for allusions both explicit and implicit in the text, and variant readings for the manuscript and all editions revised by Browning during his lifetime.

In form and structure, Parleyings is a series of seven poems written in Browning's own voice and addressed to figures influential in his development. The series is framed by a prologue and an epilogue, the whole amounting to some 3,500 lines. The poems are a formal contrast and a pendant to the great series of linked dramatic monologues in The Ring and the Book. They demonstrate the zest for innovation possessed by the master of the dramatic monologue in his ripe maturity. Interested readers as well as students and scholars of Browning will find a rich field of poetry and a critical mass of resources in Volume XVI of the Ohio/Baylor Browning edition.