Robert Browning's Poetry Study Guide

All you need to know about Robert Browning's Poetry is in this advanced guide to the text. Connell Guides are advanced guide books that offer sophisticated analysis and broad critical perspectives for higher-level GCSE and A Level English Literature students. Written by leading academics, Connell Guides are clear, concise and beautifully designed to help students understand, and enjoy, great works of literature. They are perfect for coursework, revision and exam preparation. Connell Guides are also great reads themselves scholarly, yet approachable and entertaining.

Robert Browning's poems are among the most influential in the English language; his impact can be felt on poets as different as Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and Robert Lowell. Unlike his boyhood hero, Shelley, Browning believed in the importance of "a need, a trust, a yearning after God". At the same time, he was profoundly engaged with the business of living: some of his poems shocked Victorian readers with their frankness and sensuality. In this short, incisive and informative book, Jonathan Keates shows how Browning mirrors the preoccupations of his own age, but is not so narrowly Victorian that he cannot transcend its prejudices and taboos. His vision of life is comprehensive and deeply compassionate.